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THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


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HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 



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NEW YORK 

DUFFIELD AND COMPANY 
1909 




Copyright, 1909 
By DUFFIELD & COMPANY 



©CU253705 


The History of Mr. Polly 


CHAPTER THE FIRST 

BEGINNINGS, AND THE BAZAAR 

I 

“ T T OLE ! ” said Mr. Polly, and then for a 

I 1 change, and with greatly increased em- 

JL JL phasis: “Ole!”. He paused, and then 
broke out with one of his private and peculiar idioms. 
“Oh! Beastly Silly Wheeze of a Hole!” 

He was sitting on a stile between two threadbare look- 
ing fields, and suffering acutely from indigestion. 

He suffered from indigestion now nearly every after- 
noon in his life, but as he lacked introspection he pro- 
jected the associated discomfort upon the world. Every 
afternoon he discovered afresh that life as a whole and 
every aspect of life that presented itself was “ beastly.” 
And this afternoon, lured by the delusive blueness of a 
sky that was blue because the wind was in the east, lie 
had come out in the hope of snatching something of the 
joyousness of spring. The mysterious alchemy of mind 
and body refused however to permit any joyousness 
whatever in the spring. 

He had had a little difficulty in finding his cap before 
he came out. He wanted his cap — the new golf cap — 


2 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


and Mrs. Polly must needs fish out his old soft brown felt 
hat. “ ’Ere’s your ’at,” she said in a tone of insincere en- 
couragement. 

He had been routing among the piled newspapers under 
the kitchen dresser, and had turned quite hopefully and 
taken the thing. He put it on. But it didn’t feel right. 
Nothing felt right. He put a trembling hand upon the 
crown of the thing and pressed it on his head, and tried it 
askew to the right and then askew to the left. 

Then the full sense of the indignity offered him came 
home to him. The hat masked the upper sinister quarter 
of his face, and he spoke with a wrathful eye regarding 
his wife from under the brim. In a voice thick with fury 
he said : “ I s’pos^ you’d like me to wear that silly Mud 
Pie for ever, eh ? I tell you I won’t. I’m sick of it. I’m 
pretty near sick of everything, comes to that. . . . 

Hat!” 

He clutched it with quivering fingers. “ Hat ! ” he 
repeated. Then he flung it to the ground, and kicked it 
with extraordinary fury across the kitchen. It flew up 
against the door and dropped to the ground with its rib- 
bon band half off. 

“ Shan’t go out ! ” he said, and sticking his hands into 
his jacket pockets discovered the missing cap in the right 
one. 

There was nothing for it but to go straight upstairs 
without a word, and out, slamming the shop door hard. 

“ Beauty ! ” said Mrs. Polly at last to a tremendous 
silence, picking up and dusting the rejected headdress. 
“ Tantrums,” she added. “ I ’aven’t patience.” And 


3 


BEGINNINGS , AND THE BAZAAR 

moving with the slow reluctance of a deeply offended 
woman, she began to pile together the simple apparatus 
of their recent meal, for transportation to the scullery 
sink. 

The repast she had prepared for him did not seem to 
her to justify his ingratitude. There had been the cold 
pork from Sunday and some nice cold potatoes, and 
Rashdall’s Mixed Pickles, of which he was inordinately 
fond. He had eaten three gherkins, two onions, a small 
cauliflower head and several capers with every appear- 
ance of appetite, and indeed with avidity; and then there 
had been cold suet pudding to follow, with treacle, and 
then a nice bit of cheese. It was the pale, hard sort of 
cheese he liked; red cheese he declared was indigestible. 
He had also had three big slices of greyish baker’s bread, 
and had drunk the best part of the jugful of beer. . . . 
But there seems to be no pleasing some people. 

“Tantrums!” said Mrs. Polly at the sink, struggling 
with the mustard on his plate and expressing the only 
solution of the problem that occurred to her. 

And Mr. Polly sat on the stile and hated the whole 
scheme of life — which was at once excessive and inade- 
quate as a solution. He hated Foxburne, he hated Fox- 
bourne High Street, he hated his shop and his wife and 
his neighbours — every blessed neighbour — and with in- 
describable bitterness he hated himself. 

“ Why did I ever get in this silly Hole ? ” he said. 
“ Why did I ever?” 

He sat on the stile, and looked with eyes that seemed 
blurred with impalpable flaws at a world in which even 


4 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


the spring buds were wilted, the sunlight metallic and 
the shadows mixed with blue-black ink. 

To the moralist I know he might have served as a fig- 
ure of sinful discontent, but that is because it is the habit 
of moralists to ignore material circumstances, — if indeed 
one may speak of a recent meal as a circumstance, — 
with Mr. Polly circum. Drink, indeed, our teachers will 
criticise nowadays both as regards quantity and quality, 
but neither church nor state nor school will raise a warn- 
ing finger between a man and his hunger and his wife’s 
catering. So on nearly every day in his life Mr. Polly fell 
into a violent rage and hatred against the outer world in 
the afternoon, and never suspected that it was this inner 
world to which I am with such masterly delicacy allud- 
ing, that was thus reflecting its sinister disorder upon the 
things without. It is a pity that some human beings art 
not more transparent. If Mr. Polly for example had 
been transparent or even passably translucent, then per- 
haps he might have realised from the Laocoon struggle 
he would have glimpsed, that indeed he was not so much 
a human being as a civil war. 

Wonderful things must have been going on inside Mr. 
Polly. Oh ! wonderful things. It must have been like a 
badly managed industrial city during a period of depres- 
sion ; agitators, acts of violence, strikes, the forces of law 
and order doing their best, rushings to and fro, upheavels, 
the Marseillaise, tumbrils, the rumble and the thunder of 
the tumbrils. . . . 

I do not know why the east wind aggravates life to 
unhealthy people. It made Mr. Polly’s teeth seem loose in 


BEGINNINGS , AND THE BAZAAR 5 

his head, and his skin feel like a misfit, and his hair a dry, 
stringy exasperation. . . . 

Why cannot doctors give us an antidote to the east 
wind? 

“ Never have the sense to get your hair cut till it’s too 
long,” said Mr. Polly catching sight of his shadow, “ you 
blighted degenerated Paintbrush ! Ugh ! ” and he flat- 
tend down the projecting tails with an urgent hand 

II 

Mr. Polly’s age was exactly thirty-five years and a 
half. He was a short, compact figure, and a little inclined 
to a localised embonpoint. His face was not unpleasing ; 
the features fine, but a trifle too pointed about the nose to 
be classically perfect. The corners of his sensitive mouth 
were depressed. His eyes were ruddy brown and trou- 
bled, and the left one was round with more of wonder in 
it than its fellow. His complexion was dull and yellow- 
ish. That, as I have explained, on account of those civil 
disturbances. He was, in the technical sense of the word, 
clean shaved, with a small sallow patch under the right 
ear and a cut on the chin. His brow had the little puck- 
erings of a thoroughly discontented man, little wrinklings 
and lumps, particularly over his right eye, and he sat with 
his hands in his pockets, a little askew on the stile and 
swung one leg. 

“ Hole ! ” he repeated presently. 

He broke into a quavering song. 

Be-e-astly Silly Hole ! ” 


“ Ro-o-o-tten 


6 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


His voice thickened with rage, and the rest of his dis- 
course was marred by an unfortunate choice of epithets. 

He was dressed in a shabby black morning coat and 
vest, the braid that wound these garments was a little 
loose in places; his collar was chosen from stock and 
with projecting corners, technically a “ wing-poke/’ that 
and his tie, which was new and loose and rich in colour- 
ing, had been selected to encourage and stimulate cus- 
tomers — for he dealt in gentlemen’s outfitting. His golf 
cap, which was also from stock and aslant over his eye, 
gave his misery a desperate touch. ... He wore brown 
leather boots — because he hated the smell of blacking. 

Perhaps after all it was not simply indigestion that 
troubled him. 

Behind the superficialities of Mr. Polly’s being, moved 
a larger and vaguer distress. The elementary education 
he had acquired had left him with the impression that 
arithmetic was a fluky science and best avoided in prac- 
tical affairs, but even the absence of book-keeping and a 
total inability to distinguish between capital and interest 
could not blind him for ever to the fact that the little 
shop in the High Street was not paying. An absence of 
returns, a constriction of credit, a depleted till, the most 
grey spaces of time after meals, when all one’s courage 
against these insistent phenomena. One might bustle 
about in the morning before dinner, and in the afternoon 
after tea and forget that hugh dark cloud of insolvency 
that gathered and spread in the background, but it was 
part of the desolation of these afternoon periods, these 
grey spaces of time after mtals, when all one’s courage 


BEGINNINGS , AND THE BAZAAR y 

had descended to the unseen battles of the pit, that life 
seemed stripped to the bone and one saw with a hopeless 
clearness. 

Let me tell the history of Mr. Polly from the cradle to 
these present difficulties. 

“ First the infant, mewling and puking in its nurse’s arms.” 

There had been a time when two people had thought 
Mr. Polly, the most wonderful and adorable thing in the 
world, had kissed his toe-nails, saying “ myum, myum,” 
and marvelled at the exquisite softness and delicacy of 
his hair, had called to one another to remark the peculiar 
distinction with which he bubbled, had disputed whether 
the sound he had made was just da da, or truly and inten- 
tionally dadda, had washed him in the utmost detail, and 
wraped him up in soft, warm blankets, and smothered 
him with kisses. A regal time that was, and four and 
thirty years ago; and a merciful forgetfulness barred Mr. 
Polly from ever bringing its careless luxury, its auto- 
cratic demands and instant obedience, into contrast with 
his present condition of life. These two people had 
worshipped him from the crown of his head to the soles 
of his exquisite feet. And also they had fed him rather 
unwisely, for no one had ever troubled to teach his mother 
anything about the mysteries of a child’s upbringing — • 
though of course the monthly nurse and her charwoman 
gave some valuable hints — and by his fifth birthday the 
perfect rhythms of his nice new interior were already 
darkened with perplexity. . . , 


8 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


His mother died when he was seven. 

He began only to have distinctive memories of himself 
in the time when his education had already begun. 

I remember seeing a picture of Education — in some 
place. I think it was Education, but quite conceivably it 
represented the Empire teaching her Sons, and I have a 
strong impression that it was a wall painting upon some 
public building in Manchester or Birmingham or Glas- 
gow, but very possibly I am mistaken about that. It 
represented a glorious woman with a wise and fearless 
face stooping over her children and pointing them to far 
horizons. The sky displayed the pearly warmth of a 
summer dawn, and all the painting was marvellously 
bright as if with the youth and -hope of the delicately 
beautiful children in the foreground. • She was telling 
them, one felt, of the great prospect of life that opened 
before them, of the spectacle of the world, the splendours 
of sea and mountain they might travel and see, the joys 
of skill they might acquire, of effort and the pride of 
effort and the devotions and nobilities it was theirs to 
achieve. Perhaps even she whispered of the warm 
triumphant mystery of love that comes at last to those 
who have patience and unblemished hearts. . . . She 

was reminding them of their great heritage as English 
children, rulers of more than one-fifth of mankind, of the 
obligation to do and be the best that such a pride of 
empire entails, of their essential nobility and knighthood 
and the restraints and the charities and the disciplined 
strength that is becoming in knights and rulers. . . . 

The education of Mr. Polly did not follow this picture 


BEGINNINGS , AND THE BAZAAR 


9 


very closely. He went for some time to a National 
School, which was run on severely economical lines to 
keep down the rates by a largely untrained staff, he was 
set sums to do that he did not understand, and that no 
one made him understand, he was made to read the 
catechism and Bible with the utmost industry and an en- 
tire disregard of punctuation or significance, and caused 
to imitate writing copies and drawing copies, and given 
object lessons upon sealing wax and silk-worms and po- 
tato bugs and ginger and iron and such like things, and 
taught various other subjects his mind refused to enter- 
tain, and afterwards, when he was about twelve, he was 
jerked by his parents to “ finish off ” in a private school 
of dingy aspect and still dingier pretensions, where there 
were no object lessons, and the studies of book-keeping 
and French were pursued (but never effectually over- 
taken) under the guidance of an elderly gentleman who 
wore a nondescript gown and took snuff, wrote copper- 
plate, explained nothing, and used a cane with remarkable 
dexterity and gusto. 

Mr. Polly went into the National School at six and he 
left the private school at fourteen, and by that time his 
mind was in much the same state that you would be in, 
dear reader, if you were operated upon for appendicitis 
by a well-meaning, boldly enterprising, but rather over- 
worked and under-paid butcher boy, who was superseded 
towards the climax of the operation by a left-handed clerk 
of high principles but intemperate habits, — that is to say, 
it was in a thorough mess. The nice little curiosities and 
willingness of a child were in a jumbled and thwarted 


10 


THE HISTORY OF MR . POLLY 


condition, hacked and cut about — the operators had left, 
so to speak, all their sponges and ligatures in the mangled 
confusion — and Mr. Polly had lost much of his natural 
confidence, so far as figures and sciences and languages 
and the possibilities of learning things were concerned. 
He thought of the present world no longer as a wonder- 
land of experiences, but as geography and history, as the 
repeating of names that were hard to pronounce, and 
lists of products and populations and heights and lengths, 
and as lists and dates — oh! and boredom indescribable. 
He thought of religion as the recital of more or less in- 
comprehensible words that were hard to remember, and 
of the Divinity as of a limitless Being having the nature 
of a schoolmaster and making infinite rules, known and 
unknown rules, that were always ruthlessly enforced, and 
with an infinite capacity for punishment and, most hor- 
rible of all to think of! limitless powers of espial. (So 
to the best of his ability he did not think of that unrelent- 
ing eye.) He was uncertain about the spelling and pro- 
nunciation of most of the words in our beautiful but 
abundant and perplexing tongue, — that especially was a 
pity because words attracted him, and under happier con- 
ditions he might have used them well — he was always 
doubtful whether it was eight sevens or nine eights that 
was sixty- three — (he knew no method for settling the 
difficulty) and he thought the merit of a drawing con- 
sisted in the care with which it was “ lined in.” “ Lining 
in ” bored him beyond measure. 

But the indigestions of mind and body that were to 
play so large a part in his subsequent career were still 


BEGINNINGS , AND THE BAZAAR 


ii 


only beginning. His liver and his gastric juice, his won- 
der and imagination kept up a fight against the things 
that threatened to overwhelm soul and body together. 
Outside the regions devastated by the school curriculum 
he was still intensely curious. He had cheerful phases 
of enterprise, and about thirteen he suddenly discovered 
reading and its joys. He began to read stories vora- 
ciously, and books of travel, provided they were also 
adventurous. He got these chiefly from the local insti- 
tute, and he also “ took in,” irregularly but thoroughly, 
one of those inspiring weeklies that dull people used to 
call “ penny dreadfuls,” admirable weeklies crammed with 
imagination that the cheap boys’ “ comics ” of to-day 
have replaced. At fourteen, when he emerged from the 
valley of the shadow of education, there survived some- 
thing, indeed it survived still, obscured and thwarted, 
at five and thirty, that pointed — not with a visible and 
prevailing finger like the finger of that beautiful woman 
in the picture, but pointed nevertheless — to the idea that 
there was interest and happiness in the world. Deep in 
the being of Mr. Polly, deep in that darkness, like a 
creature which has been beaten about the head and left 
for dead but still lives, crawled a persuasion that over 
and above the things that are jolly and “ bits of all right,” 
there was beauty, there was delight, that somewhere — 
magically inaccessible perhaps, but still somewhere, were 
pure and easy and joyous states of body and mind. 

He would sneak out on moonless winter nights and 
stare up at the stars, and afterwards find it difficult to 
tell his father where he had been. 


12 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


He would read tales about hunters and explorers, and 
imagine himself riding mustangs as fleet as the wind 
across the prairies of Western America, or coming as a 
conquering and adored white man into the swarming 
villages of central Africa. He shot bears with a revolver 
— >a, cigarette in the other hand — and made a necklace of 
their teeth and claws for the chief’s beautiful young 
daughter. Also he killed a lion with a pointed stake, 
stabbing through the beast’s heart as it stood over him. 

He thought it would be splendid to be a diver and go 
down into the dark green mysteries of the sea. 

He led stormers against well-nigh impregnable forts, 
and died on the ramparts at the moment of victory. 
(His grave was watered by a nation’s tears.) 

He rammed and torpedoed ships, one against ten. 

He was beloved by queens in barbaric lands, and recon- 
ciled whole nations to the Christian faith. 

He was martyred, and took it very calmly and beauti- 
fully — but only once or twice after the Revivalist week. 
It did not become a habit with him. 

He explored the Amazon, and found, newly exposed 
by the fall of a great tree, a rock of gold. 

Engaged in these pursuits he would neglect the work 
immediately in hand, sitting somewhat slackly on the 
form and projecting himself in a manner tempting to a 
schoolmaster with a cane. . . . And twice he had 

books confiscated. 

Recalled to the realities of life, he would rub himself 
or sigh deeply as the occasion required, and resume his 
attempts to write as good as copperplate. He hated 


13 


BEGINNINGS , AND THE BAZAAR 

writing ; the ink always crept up his fingers and the smell 
of ink offended him. And he was filled with unexpressed 
doubts. Why should writing slope down from right to 
left? Why should downstrokes be thick and upstrokes 
thin? Why should the handle of one’s pen point over 
one’s right shoulder? 

His copy books towards the end foreshadowed his 
destiny and took the form of commercial documents. 
“Dear Sir,” they ran, “Referring to your esteemed or- 
der of the 26th ult., we beg to inform you,” and so on. 

The compression of Mr. Polly’s mind and soul in the 
educational institutions of his time, was terminated ab- 
ruptly by his father between his fourteenth and fifteenth 
birthday. His father — who had long since forgotten the 
time when his son’s little limbs seemed to have come 
straight from God’s hand, and when he had kissed five 
minute toe-nails in a rapture of loving tenderness — 
remarked : 

“ It’s time that dratted boy did something for a living.” 

And a month or so later Mr. Polly began that career in 
business that led him at last to the sole proprietorship of 
a bankrupt outfitter’s shop — and to the stile on which 
he was sitting. 

Ill 

Mr. Polly was not naturally interested in hosiery and 
gentlemen’s outfitting. At times, indeed, he urged him- 
self to a spurious curiosity about that trade, but presently 
something more congenial came along and checked the 
effort. He was apprenticed in one of those large, rather 


14 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


low-class establishments which sell everything from 
pianos and furniture to books and millinary, a department 
store in fact, The Port Burdock Drapery Bazaar at Port 
Burdock, one of the three townships that are grouped 
around the Port Burdock naval dockyards. There he re- 
mained six years. He spent most of his time inattentive 
to business, in a sort of uncomfortable happiness, increas- 
ing his indigestion. 

On the whole he preferred business to school, the hours 
were longer but the tension was not nearly so great. 
The place was better aired, you were not kept in for no 
reason at all, and the cane was not employed. You 
watched the growth of your moustache with interest and 
impatience, and mastered the beginnings of social inter- 
course. You talked, and found there were things amus- 
ing to say. Also you had regular pocket money, and a 
voice in the purchase of your clothes, and presently a 
small salary. And there were girls. And friendship! 
In the retrospect Port Burdock sparkled with the facets 
of quite a cluster of remembered jolly times. 

(“ Didn’t save much money though,” said Mr. Polly.) 

The first apprentices’ dormitory was a long bleak room 
with six beds, six chests of drawers and looking glasses 
and a number of boxes of wood or tin ; it opened into a 
still longer and bleaker room of eight beds, and this into 
a third apartment with yellow grained paper and Ameri- 
can cloth tables, which was the dining-room by day and 
the men’s sitting- and smoking-room after nine. Here 
Mr. Polly, who had been an only child, first tasted the joys 
of social intercourse. At first there were attempts to bully 


BEGINNINGS , AND THE BAZAAR 15 

him on account of his refusal to consider face washing a 
diurnal duty, but two fights with the apprentices next 
above him, established a useful reputation for choler, and 
the presence of girl apprentices in the shop somehow 
raised his standard of cleanliness to a more acceptable 
level. He didn’t of course have very much to do with 
the feminine staff in his department, but he spoke to them 
casually as he traversed foreign parts of the Bazaar, or 
got out of their way politely, or helped them to lift down 
heavy boxes, and on such occasions he felt their scrutiny. 
Except in the course of business or at meal times the 
men and women of the establishment had very little op- 
portunity of meeting; the men were in their rooms and 
the girls in theirs. Yet these feminine creatures, at once 
so near and so remote, affected him profoundly. He 
would watch them going to and fro, and marvel secretly 
at the beauty of their hair or the roundness of their 
necks or the warm softness of their cheeks or the delicacy 
of their hands. He would fall into passions for them at 
dinner time, and try and show devotions by his manner 
of passing the bread and margarine at tea. There was a 
very fair-haired, fair-skinned apprentice in the adjacent 
haberdashery to whom he said “ good-morning ” every 
morning, and for a period it seemed to him the most 
significant event in his day. When she said, “ I do hope 
it will be fine to-morrow,” he felt it marked an epoch. 
He had had no sisters, and was innately disposed to wor- 
ship womenkind. But he did not betray as much to 
Platt and Parsons. 

To Platt and Parsons he affected an attitude of sea- 


i6 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


soned depravity towards womankind. Platt and Parsons 
were his contemporary apprentices in departments of the 
drapery shop, and the three were drawn together into a 
close friendship by the fact that all their names began 
with P. They decided they were the Three Ps, and went 
about together of an evening with the bearing of des- 
perate dogs. Sometimes, when they had money, they 
went into public houses and had drinks. Then they 
would become more desperate than ever, and walk along 
the pavement under the gas lamps arm in arm singing. 
Platt had a good tenor voice, and had been in a church 
choir, and so he led the singing; Parsons had a service- 
able bellow, which roared and faded and roared again 
very wonderfully ; Mr. Polly’s share was an extraordinary 
lowing noise, a sort of flat recitative which he called 
“ singing seconds.” They would have sung catches if 
they had known how to do it, but as it was they sang 
melancholy music hall songs about dying soldiers and the 
old folks far away. 

They would sometimes go into the quieter residential 
quarters of Port Burdock, where policemen and other ob- 
stacles were infrequent, and really let their voices soar 
like hawks and feel very happy. The dogs of the district 
would be stirred to hopeless emulation, and would keep 
it up for long after the Three Ps had been swallowed up 
by the night. One jealous brute of an Irish terrier made 
a gallant attempt to bite Parsons, but was beaten by num- 
bers and solidarity. 

The three Ps took the utmost interest in each other 
and found no other company so good. They talked 


BEGINNINGS , AND THE BAZAAR 17 

about everything in the world, and would go on talking 
in their dormitory after the gas was out until the other 
men were reduced to throwing boots ; they skulked from 
their departments in the slack hours of the afternoon to 
gossip in the packing room of the warehouse; on Sun- 
days and Bank holidays they went for long walks to- 
gether, talking. 

Platt was white- faced and dark, and disposed to under- 
tones and mystery and a curiosity about society and the 
demi-monde. He kept himself au courant by reading a 
penny paper of infinite suggestion called Modern So- 
ciety. Parsons was of an ampler build, already promising 
fatness, with curly hair and a lot of rolling, rollicking, 
curly features, and a large blob-shaped nose. He had a 
great memory and a real interest in literature. He 
knew great portions of Shakespeare and Milton by heart, 
and would recite them at the slightest provocation. He 
read everything he could get hold of, and if he liked it 
he read it aloud. It did not matter who else liked it. At 
first Mr. Polly was disposed to be suspicious of this 
literature, but was carried away by Parsons’ enthusiasm. 
The three Ps went to a performance of “ Romeo and 
Juliet ” at the Port Burdock Theatre Royal, and hung 
over the gallery fascinated. After that they made a sort 
of password of : “ Do you bite your thumbs at Us, Sir? ” 

To which the countersign was : “ We bite our 

thumbs.” 

For weeks the glory of Shakespeare’s Verona lit Mr. 
Polly’s life. He walked as though he carried a sword at 


18 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

his side, and swung a mantle from his shoulders. He 
went through the grimy streets of Port Burdock with 
his eye on the first floor windows — looking for balconies. 
A ladder in the yard flooded his mind with romantic 
ideas. Then Parsons discovered an Italian waiter, whose 
name Mr. Polly rendered as “ Bocashieu,” and after 
some excursions into that author’s remains the talk of 
Parsons became infested with the word “ amours,” and 
Mr. Polly would stand in front of his hosiery fixtures 
trifling with paper and string and thinking of perennial 
picnics under dark olive trees in the everlasting sunshine 
of Italy. 

And about that time it was that all three Ps adopted 
turn down collars and large loose artistic silk ties, which 
they tied very much on one side and wore with an air of 
defiance. And a certain swashbuckling carriage. 

And then came the glorious revelation of that great 
Frenchman whom Mr. Polly called “ Rabooloose.” The 
three Ps thought the birth feast of Gargantua the most 
glorious piece of writing in the world, and I am not 
certain they were wrong, and on wet Sunday evenings 
when there was danger of hymn singing they would get 
Parsons to read it aloud. 

Towards the several members of the Y. M. C. A. who 
shared the dormitory, the three Ps always maintained a 
sarcastic and defiant attitude. 

“We got a perfect right to do what we like in our 
corner.” Platt maintained. “You do what you like in 
yours.” 

“But the language!” objected Morrison, the white- 


BEGINNINGS , AND THE BAZAAR 


19 


faced, earnest-eyed improver, who was leading a pro- 
foundly religious life under great difficulties. 

“ Language man ! ” roared Parsons, “ why, it’s 

LITERATURE ! ” 

“ Sunday isn’t the time for Literature.” 

“ It’s the only time we’ve got. And besides ” 

The horrors of religious controversy would begin. . . . 
ys Mr. Polly stuck loyally to the Three Ps, but in the 
sec ret plac es of his heart' Tie was torn. A fire of convic- 
tion burnt in Morrison’s eyes and spoke in his urgent 
persuasive voice; he lived the better life manifestly, 
chaste in word and deed, industrious, studiously kindly. 
When the junior apprentice had sore feet and home- 
sickness Morrison washed the feet and comforted the 
heart, and he helped other men to get through with their 
work when he might have gone early, a superhuman 
thing to do. Polly was secretly a little afraid to be left 
alone with this man and the power of the spirit that was 
in him. He felt watched. 

Platt, also struggling with things his mind could not 
contrive to reconcile, said “ that confounded hypocrite.” 

“ He’s no hypocrite,” said Parsons, “ he’s no hypocrite, 
o’ man. But he’s got no blessed Joy de Vive; that’s what 
wrong with him. Let’s go down to the Harbour Arma 
and see some of those blessed old captains getting drunk.” 

“ Short of sugar, O’Man,” said Mr. Polly, slapping his 
trowser pocket. 

“ Oh, carm on,” said Parsons. “ Always do it on tup- 
pence for a bitter.” 

“Lemme get my pipe on,” said Platt, who had re- 


20 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


cently taken to smoking with great ferocity. “ Then 
I’m with you.” 

Pain and struggle. 

“ Don’t ram it down, O’Man,” said Parsons, watching 
with knitted brows. “Don’t ram it down. Give it Air. 
Seen my stick, O’man ? Right O.” 

And leaning on his cane he composed himself in an at- 
titude of sympathetic patience towards Platt’s incendiary 
efforts. 

IV 

Jolly days of companionship they were for the incipient 
bankrupt on the stile to look back upon. 

The interminable working hours of the Bazaar had 
long since faded from his memory — except for one or 
two conspicuous rows and one or two larks — but the rare 
Sundays and holidays shone out like diamonds among 
pebbles. They shone with the mellow splendour of even- 
ing skies reflected in calm water, and athwart them all 
went old Parsons bellowing an interpretation of life, ges- 
ticulating, appreciating and making appreciate, expound- 
ing books, talking of that mystery of his, the “ Joy de 
Vive.” 

There were some particularly splendid walks on Bank 
holidays. The three Ps would start on Sunday morning 
early and find a room in some modest inn and talk them- 
selves asleep, and return singing through the night, or 
having an “ argy bargy ” about the stars, on Monday 
evening. They would come over the hill out of the 
pleasant English country side in which they had wan- 


BEGINNINGS , AND THE BAZAAR 21 

dered, and see Port Burdock spread out below, a net- 
work of interlacing street lamps and shifting tram lights 
against the black, beacon-gemmed immensity of the har- 
bour waters. 

“ Back to the collar, O’Man,” Parsons would say. 
There is no satisfactory plural to O’man, so he always 
used it in the singular. 

“ Don’t mention it,” said Platt. 

And once they got a boat for the whole summer day, 
and rowed up past the moored ironclads and the black 
old hulks and the various shipping of the harbour, past a 
white troopship and past the trim front and the slips and 
interesting vistas of the dockyard to the shallow chan- 
nels and rocky weedy wildernesses of the upper harbour. 
And Parsons and Mr. Polly had a great dispute and quar- 
rel that day as to how far a big gun could shoot. 

The country over the hills behind Port Burdock is all 
that an old-fashioned, scarcely disturbed English country 
side should be. In those days the bicycle was still rare 
and costly and the motor car had yet to come and stir up 
rural serenities. The three P’s would take footpaths 
haphazard across fields, and plunge into unknown wind- 
ing lanes between high hedges of honeysuckle and 
dogrose. Greatly daring, they would follow green bridle 
paths through primrose studded undergrowths, or wander 
waist deep in the bracken of beech woods. About twenty 
miles from Port Burdock there came a region of hop 
gardens and hoast crowned farms, and further on, to be 
reached only by cheap tickets on Bank Holiday times was 
a sterile ridge of very clean roads and red sand pits and 


22 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


pines and gorse and heather. The three Ps could not 
afford to buy bicycles and they found boots the greatest 
item of their skimpy expenditure. They threw appear- 
ances to the winds at last and got ready-made working- 
men’s hob-nails. There was much discussion and strong 
feeling over this step in the dormitory. 

There is no country-side like the English country-side 
for those who have learnt to love it; its firm yet gentle 
lines of hill and dale, its ordered confusion of features, 
its deer parks and downland, its castles and stately 
houses, its hamlets and old churches, its farms and ricks 
and great barns and ancient trees, its pools and ponds 
and shining threads of rivers; its flower-starred hedge- 
rows, its orchards and woodland patches, its village 
greens and kindly inns. Other country sides have their 
pleasant aspects, but none such variety, none that shine so 
steadfastly throughout the year. Picardy is pink and 
white and pleasant in the blossom time, Burgundy goes 
on with its sunshine and wide hillsides and cramped vine- 
yards, a beautiful tune repeated and repeated, Italy gives 
salitas and wayside chapels and chestnfuts and olive 
orchards, the Ardennes has its woods and gorges — 
Touraine and the Rhineland, the wide Campagna with its 
distant Appenines, and the neat prosperities and moun- 
tain back grounds of South Germany all clamour their 
especial merits at one’s memory. And there are the hills 
and fields of Virginia, like an England grown very big and 
slovenly, the woods and big river sweeps of Pennsylvania, 
the trim New England landscape, a little bleak and rather 
fine like the New England mind, and the wide rough 


BEGINNINGS , AND THE BAZAAR 23 

country roads and hills and woodland of New York 
state. But none of these change scene and character in 
three miles of walking, nor have so mellow a sunlight 
nor so diversified a cloudland, nor confess the perpetual 
refreshment of the strong soft winds that blow from off 
the sea as our Mother England does. 

It was good for the three Ps to walk through such 
a land and forget for a time that indeed they had no foot- 
ing in it all, that they were doomed to toil behind 
counters in such places as Port Burdock for the better 
part of their lives. They would forget the customers 
and shopwalkers and department buyers and everything, 
and become just happy wanderers in a world of pleasant 
breezes and song birds and shady trees. 

The arrival at the inn was a great affair. No one, 
they were convinced, would take them for drapers, and 
there might be a pretty serving girl or a jolly old lady, 
or what Parsons called a “ bit of character ” drinking in 
the bar. 

There would always be weighty enquiries as to what 
they could have, and it would work out always at 
cold beef and pickles, or fried ham and eggs and shandy- 
gaff, two pints of beer and two bottles of ginger beer 
foaming in a huge round bellied jug. 

The glorious moment of standing lordly in the inn 
doorway, and staring out at the world, the swinging sign, 
the geese upon the green, the duckpond, a waiting) 
waggon, the church tower, a sleepy cat, the blue heavens 
with the sizzle of the frying audible behind one! The 
keen smell of the bacon ! The trotting of feet bearing the 


24 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


repast; the click and clatter as the table ware is finally 
arranged ! A clean white cloth ! 

“ Ready, Sir ! ” or “ Ready, Gentlemen/’ Better hear- 
ing that than “ Forward Polly ! look sharp ! ” 

The going in ! The sitting down ! The falling to ! 

“ Bread, O’ man?” 

“ Right O ! Don’t bag all the crust, O’ man.” 

Once a simple mannered girl in a pink print dress 
stayed and talked with them as they ate; led by the gal- 
lant Parsons they professed to be all desperately in love 
with her and courted her to say which she preferred of 
them, it was so manifest she did prefer one and so impos- 
sible to say which it was held her there, until a dis- 
tant maternal voice called her away. Afterwards as they 
left the inn she waylaid them at the orchard corner and 
gave them, a little shyly, three keen yellow-green ap- 
ples — and wished them to come again some day, and 
vanished, and reappeared looking after them as they 
turned the corner — waving a white handkerchief. All 
the rest of that day they disputed over the signs of her 
favour, and the next Sunday they went there again. 

But she had vanished, and a mother of forbidding 
aspect afforded no explanations. 

If Platt and Parsons and Mr. Polly live to be a hun- 
dred, they will none of them forget that girl as she stood 
with a pink flush upon her, faintly smiling and yet 
earnest, parting the branches of the hedgerows and 
reaching down apple in hand. Which of them was it, 
had caught her spirit to attend to them? . . . 

And once they went along the coast, following it as 


BEGINNINGS , AND THE BAZAAR 25 

closely as possible, and so came at last to Foxburne, that 
easternmost suburb of Brayling and Hampsted-on-the- 
Sea. 

Foxbourne seemed a very jolly little place to Mr. Polly 
that afternoon. It has a clean sandy beach instead of 
the mud and pebbles and coaly defilements of Port Bur- 
dock, a row of six bathing machines, and a shelter on 
the parade in which the three Ps sat after a satisfying 
but rather expensive lunch that had included celery. 
Rows of verandahed villas proffered apartments, they 
had feasted in ?.n hotel with a porch painted white and 
gay with geraniums above, and the High Street with the 
old church at the head had been full of an agreeable af- 
ternoon stillness. 

“ Nice little place for business,” said Platt sagely from 
behind his big pipe. 

It stuck in Mr. Polly’s memory. 

V 

Mr. Polly was not so picturesque a youth as Parsons. 
He lacked richness in his voice, and went about in those 
days with his hands in his pockets looking quietly specu- 
lative. 

He specialised in slang and the disuse of English, and 
he played the role of an appreciative stimulant to Par- 
sons. Words attracted him curiously, words rich in sug- 
gestion, and he loved a novel and striking phrase. His 
school training had given him little or no mastery of the 
mysterious pronunciation of English and no confidence in 


26 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


himself. His schoolmaster indeed had been both unsound 
and variable. New words had terror and fascination 
for him; he did not acquire them, he could not avoid 
them, and so he plunged into them. His only rule was 
not to be misled by the guide anyhow. He avoided 
every recognised phrase in the language and mispro- 
nounced everything in order that he shouldn’t be sus- 
pected of ignorance but whim. 

“ Sesquippledan,” he would say. “ Sesquippledan ver- 
boojuice.” 

“Eh?” said Platt. 

“ Eloquent Rapsodooce.” 

“ Where? ” asked Platt. 

“ In the warehouse, O’man. All among the tablecloths 
and blankets. Carlyle. He’s reading aloud. Doing the 
High Froth. Spuming! Windmilling! Waw, waw ! 
It’s a sight worth seeing. He’ll bark his blessed knuckles 
one of these days on the fixtures, O’man.” 

He held an imaginary book in one hand and waved an 
eloquent gesture. “ So too shall every Hero inasmuch 
as notwithstanding for evermore come back to Reality,” 
parodied the enthusiastic Parsons, “ so that in fashion 
and thereby, upon things and not under things articulari- 
ously He stands.” 

“ I should laugh if the Governor dropped on him,” 
said Platt. “ He’d never hear him coming.” 

“ The O’Man’s drunk with it — fair drunk,” said Polly. 
“ I never did. It’s worse than when he got on to Ra- 
boloose.” 


CHAPTER THE SECOND 


THE DISMISSAL OF PARSONS 

I 

S UDDENLY Parsons got himself dismissed. 

He got himself dismissed under circumstances 
of peculiar violence, that left a deep impression 
on Mr. Polly’s mind. He wondered about it for years 
afterwards, trying to get the rights of the case. 

Parsons’ apprenticeship was over; he had reached the 
status of an Improver, and he dressed the window of the 
Manchester department. By all the standards available 
he dressed it very well. By his own standards he dressed 
it wonderfully. Well, O’man,” he used to say, “ there’s 
one thing about my position here, — I can dress a win- 
dow.” 

And when trouble was under discussion he would hold 
that “ little Fluffums ” — which was the apprentice’s 
name for Mr. Garvace, the senior partner and managing 
director of the Bazaar — would think twice before he got 
rid of the only man in the place who could make a win- 
dowful of Manchester goods tell. 

Then like many a fellow artist he fell a prey to 
theories. 

“ The art of window dressing is in its Infancy, O’Man 
27 


28 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


— in its blooming Infancy. All balance and stiffness like 
a blessed Egyptian picture. No Joy in it, no blooming 
Joy! Conventional. A shop window ought to get hold 
of people, grip ’em as they go along. It stands to reason. 
Grip ! ” 

His voice would sink to a kind of quiet bellow. “ Do 
they grip ? ” 

Then after a pause, a savage roar; “Naur! ” 

“ He’s got a Heavy on,” said Mr. Polly. “ Go it, O’ 
man ; let’s have some more of it.” 

“ Look at old Morrison’s dress stuff windows ! Tidy, 
tasteful, correct, I grant you, but Bleak ! ” He let out 
the word reinforced to a shout ; “ Bleak ! ” 

“ Bleak ! ” echoed Mr. Polly. 

“ Just pieces of stuff in rows, rows of tidy little puffs, 
perhaps one bit just unrolled, quiet tickets.” 

“ Might, as well be in church, O’ Man,” said Mr. Polly. 

“ A window ought to be exciting,” said Parsons ; “ it 
ought to make you say : El -lo ! when you see it.” 

He paused, and Platt watched him over a snorting pipe. 

“ Rockcockyo,” said Mr. Polly. 

“We want a new school of window dressing,” said 
Parsons, regardless of the comment. “A New School ! 
The Port Burdock school. Day after to-morrow I change 
the Fitzallan Street stuff. This time, it’s going to be a 
change. I mean to have a crowd or bust ! ” 

And as a matter of fact he did both. 

His voice dropped to a note of self-reproach. “ I’ve 
been timid, O’ man. I’ve been holding myself in. I 


THE DISMISSAL OF PARSONS 


29 


haven’t done myself Justice. I’ve kept down the sim- 
mering, seething, teeming ideas. ... All that’s over 
now.” 

“ Over,” gulped Polly. 

“ Over for good and all, O’ man.” 

II 

Platt came to Polly, who was sorting up collar boxes. 
“ O’ Man’s doing his Blooming Window.” 

“ What window ? ” 

“ What he said.” 

Polly remembered. 

He went on with his collar boxes with his eye on his 
senior, Mansfield. Mansfield was presently called away 
to the counting house, and instantly Polly shot out by 
the street door, and made a rapid transit along the street 
front past the Manchester window, and so into the 
silkroom door. He could not linger long, but he gathered 
joy, a swift and fearful joy, from his brief inspection of 
Parsons’ unconscious back. Parsons had his tail coat 
off and was working with vigour ; his habit of pulling his 
waistcoat straps to the utmost brought out all the agree- 
able promise of corpulence in his youthful frame. He 
was blowing excitedly and running his fingers through 
his hair, and then moving with all the swift eagerness of 
a man inspired. All about his feet and knees were scar- 
let blankets, not folded, not formally unfolded, but — the 
only phrase is — shied about. And a great bar sinister 
of roller towelling stretched across the front of the win- 


30 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


dow on which was a ticket, and the ticket said in bold 
black letters : “LOOK!” 

So soon as Mr. Polly got into the silk department and 
met Platt he knew he had not lingered nearly long enough 
outside. “Did you see the boards at the back?” said 
Platt. 

He hadn’t. “ The High Egrugious is fairly On,” he 
said, and dived down to return by devious subterranean 
routes to the outfitting department. 

Presently the street door opened and Platt, with an air 
of intense devotion to business assumed to cover his 
adoption of that unusual route, came in and made for 
the staircase down to the warehouse. He rolled up his 
eyes at Polly. “ Oh Lor/” he said and vanished. 

Irresistible curiosity seized Polly. Should he go 
through the shop to the Manchester department, or risk 
a second transit outside ? 

He was impelled to make a dive at the street door. 

“ Where are you going?” asked Mansfield. 

“ Lill Dog,” said Polly with an air of lucid explanation, 
and left him to get any meaning he could from it. 

Parsons was worth the subsequent trouble. Parsons 
really was extremely rich. This time Polly stopped to 
take it in. 

Parsons had made a huge asymetrical pile of thick 
white and red blankets twisted and rolled to accentuate 
their woolly richness, heaped up in a warm disorder, with 
large window tickets inscribed in blazing red letters : 
“ Cosy Comfort at Cut Prices,” and “ Curl up and Cud- 
dle below Cost.” Regardless of the daylight he had 


THE DISMISSAL OF PARSONS 


31 


turned up the electric light on that side of the window to 
reflect a warm glow upon the heap, and behind, in pur- 
suit of contrasted bleakness, he was now hanging long 
strips of grey silesia and chilly coloured linen dusterings. 

It was wonderful, but — 

Mr. Polly decided that it was time he went in. He 
found Platt in the silk department, apparently on the 
verge of another plunge into the exterior world. “ Cosy 
Comfort at Cut Prices,” said Polly. “ Allittritions Artful 
Aid.” 

He did not dare go into the street for the third time, 
and he was hovering feverishly near the window when 
he saw the governor, Mr. Garvace, that is to say, the 
managing director of the Bazaar, walking along the 
pavement after his manner to assure himself all was well 
with the establishment he guided. 

Mr. Garvace was a short stout man, with that air of 
modest pride that so often goes with corpulence, choleric 
and decisive in manner, and with hands that looked like 
bunches of fingers. He was red haired and ruddy and 
after the custom of such complexions, hairs sprang from 
the tip of his nose. When he wished to bring the power 
of the human eye to bear upon an assistant, he pro- 
jected his chest, knitted one brow and partially closed 
the left eyelid. 

An expression of speculative wonder overspread the 
countenance of Mr. Polly. He felt he must see. Yes, 
whatever happened he must see. 

“ Want to speak to Parsons, Sir,” he said to Mr. Mans- 


32 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


field, and deserted his post hastily, dashed through the 
intervening departments and was in position behind a 
pile of Bolton sheeting as the governor came in out of 
the street. 

“ What on Iarth do you think you are doing with that 
window, Parsons ? ” began Mr. Garvace. 

Only the legs of Parsons and the lower part of his 
waistcoat and an intervening inch of shirt were visible. 
He was standing inside the window on the steps, hanging 
up the last strip of his background from the brass rail 
along the ceiling. Within, the Manchester shop window 
was cut off by a partition rather like the partition of an 
old fashioned church pew from the general space of the 
shop. There was a panelled barrier, that is to say, with 
a little door like a pew door in it. Parsons’ face appeared, 
staring with round eyes at his employer. 

Mr. Garvace had to repeat his question. 

“ Dressing it, Sir — on new lines.” 

“ Come out of it,” said Mr. Garvace. 

Parsons stared, and Mr. Garvace had to repeat his 
command. 

Parsons, with a dazed expression, began to descend the 
steps slowly. 

Mr. Garvace turned about. “ Where’s Morrison ? 
Morrison ! ” 

Morrison appeared. 

“ Take this window over,” said Mr. Garvace pointing 
his bunch of fingers at Parsons. “ Take all this muddle 
out and dress it properly.” 

Morrison advanced and hesitated. 


THE DISMISSAL OF PARSONS 


33 

“ I beg your pardon, Sir,” said Parsons with an im- 
mense politeness, “ but this is my window.” 

“ Take it all out,” said Mr. Garvace, turning away. 

Morrison advanced. Parsons shut the door with a 
click that arrested Mr. Garvace. 

“ Come out of that window,” he said. “ You can’t 
dress it. If you want to play the fool with a win- 
dow ” 

“ This window’s All Right,” said the genius in window 
dressing, and there was a little pause. 

“ Open the door and go right in,” said Mr. Garvace to 
Morrison. 

“ You leave that door alone, Morrison,” said Parsons. 

Polly was no longer even trying to hide behind the 
stack of Bolton sheetings. He realised he was in the 
presence of forces too stupendous to heed him. 

“ Get him out,” said Mr. Garvace. 

Morrison seemed to be thinking out the ethics of his 
position. The idea of loyalty to his employer prevailed 
with him. PTe laid his hand on the door to open it ; 
Parsons tried to disengage his hand. Mr. Garvace joined 
his effort to Morrison’s. Then the heart of Polly leapt 
and the world blazed up to wonder and splendour. Par- 
sons disappeared behind the partition for a moment and 
reappeared instantly, gripping a thin cylinder of rolled 
huckaback. With this he smote at Morrison’s head. 
Morrison’s head ducked under the resounding impact, 
but he clung on and so did Mr. Garvace. The door came 
open, and then Mr. Garvace was staggering back, hand 
to head; his autocratic, his sacred baldness, smitten. 


34 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


Parsons was beyond all control — a strangeness, a mar- 
vel. Heaven knows how the artistic struggle had 
strained that richly endowed temperament. “ Say I can’t 
dress a window, you thundering old Humbug,” he said, 
and hurled the huckaback at his master. He followed 
this up by hurling first a blanket, then an armful of 
silesia, then a window support out of the window into 
the shop. It leapt into Polly’s mind that Parsons hated 
his own effort and was glad to demolish it. For a 
crowded second Polly’s mind was concentrated upon 
Parsons, infuriated, active, like a figure of earthquake 
with its coat off, shying things headlong. 

Then he perceived the back of Mr. Garvace and heard 
his gubernatorial voice crying to no one in particular 
and everybody in general : “ Get him out of the window. 
He’s mad. He’s dangerous. Get him out of the win- 
dow.” 

Then a crimson blanket was for a moment over the 
head of Mr. Garvace, and his voice, muffled for an in- 
stant, broke out into unwonted expletive. 

Then people had arrived from all parts of the Bazaar. 
Luck, the ledger clerk, blundered against Polly and said, 
“ Help him ! ” Somerville from the silks vaulted the 
counter, and seized a chair by the back. Polly lost his 
head. He clawed at the Bolton sheeting before him, 
and if he could have detached a piece he would certainly 
have hit somebody with it. As it was he simply upset the 
pile. It fell away from Polly, and he had an impression 
of somebody squeaking as it went down. It was the sort 
of impression one disregards. The collapse of the pile 


THE DISMISSAL OF PARSONS 


35 


of goods just sufficed to end his subconscious efforts to 
get something to hit somebody with, and his whole at- 
tention focussed itself upon the struggle in the window. 
For a splendid instant Parsons towered up over the active 
backs that clustered about the shop window door, an 
active whirl of gesture, tearing things down and throw- 
ing them, and then he went under. There was an in- 
stant’s furious struggle, a crash, a second crash and the 
crack of broken plate glass. Then a stillness and heavy 
breathing. 

Parsons was overpowered. . . . 

Polly, stepping over scattered pieces of Bolton sheet- 
ing, saw his transfigured friend with a dark cut, that was 
not at present bleeding, on the forehead, one arm held by 
Somerville and the other by Morrison. 

“ You — you — you — you annoyed me,” said Parsons, 
sobbing for breath. 

Ill 

There are events that detach themselves from the gen- 
eral stream of occurrences and seem to partake of the 
nature of revelations. Such was this Parsons affair. It 
began by seeming grotesque; it ended disconcertingly. 
The fabric of Mr. Polly’s daily life was torn and beneath 
it, he discovered depths and terrors. 

Life was not altogether a lark. 

The calling in of a policeman seemed at the moment a 
pantomime touch. But when it became manifest that Mr. 
Garvace was in a fury of vindictiveness, the affair took 
on a different complexion. The way in which the police- 


36 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

man made a note of everything and aspirated nothing 
impressed the sensitive mind of Polly profoundly. Polly 
presently found himself straightening up ties to the re- 
frain of “ ’E then ’It you on the ’Ed and ” 

In the dormitory that night Parsons had become heroic. 
He sat on the edge of the bed with his head bandaged, 
packing very slowly and insisting over and again : “ He 
ought to have left my window alone. O’ Man. He didn’t 
ought to have touched my window.” 

Polly was to go to the police court in the morning as 
a witness. The terror of that ordeal almost over- 
shadowed the tragic fact that Parsons was not only sum- 
moned for assault, but “ swapped,” and packing his box. 
Polly knew himself well enough to know he would make 
a bad witness. He felt sure of one fact only, namely, that 

“ ’E then ’It ’Im on the ’Ed and ” All the rest danced 

about in his mind now, and how it would dance about on 
the morrow Heaven only knew. Would there be a cross 
examination? Is it per joocery to make a slip? People 
did sometimes per juice themselves. Serious offence. 

Platt was doing his best to help Parsons, and inciting 
public opinion against Morrison. But Parsons would 
not hear of anything against Morrison. “ He was all 
right, O’ Man — according to his lights,” said Parsons. 
“ It isn’t him I complain of.” 

He speculated on the morrow. “ I shall ’ave to pay a 
fine,” he said. “No good trying to get out of it. It’s 
true I hit him. I hit him ” — he paused and seemed to be 
seeking an exquisite accuracy. His voice sank to a con- 
fidential note ; — “ On the head — about here.” 


THE DISMISSAL OF PARSONS 


37 


He answered the suggestion of a bright junior appren- 
tice in a corner of the dormitory. “ What’s the Good 
of a Cross summons ? ” he replied ; “ with old Corks, the 
chemist, and Mottishead, the House Agent, and all that 
lot on the Bench ? Humble Pie, that’s my meal to-mor- 
row, O’ Man. Humble Pie.” 

Packing went on for a time. 

“ But Lord ! what a Life it is ! ” said Parsons, giving 
his deep notes scope. “ Ten thirty five a man trying to 
do his Duty, mistaken perhaps, but trying his best; ten 
forty — Ruined! Ruined!” He lifted his voice to a 
shout. “ Ruined ! ” and dropped it to “ Like an earth- 
quake.” 

“ Heated altaclation,” said Polly. 

“ Like a blooming earthquake ! ” said Parsons, with 
the notes of a rising wind. 

He meditated gloomily upon his future and a colder 
chill invaded Polly’s mind. “ Likely to get another crib, 
ain’t I — with assaulted the guvnor on my reference. I 
suppose though he won’t give me refs. Hard enough to 
get a crib at the best of times,” said Parsons. 

“ You ought to go round with a show, O’ Man,” said 
Mr. Polly. 

Things were not so dreadful in the police court as 
Mr. Polly had expected. He was given a seat with other 
witnesses against the wall of the court, and after an in- 
teresting larceny case Parsons appeared and stood, not in 
the dock, but at the table. By that time Mr. Polly’s legs, 
which had been tucked up at first under his chair out of 
respect to the court, were extended straight before him 


38 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

and his hands were in his trouser pockets. He was in- 
venting names for the four magistrates on the bench, 
and had got to “ the Grave and Reverend Signor with 
the palatial Boko/’ when his thoughts were recalled to 
gravity by the sound of his name. He rose with alacrity 
and was fielded by an expert policeman from a brisk at- 
tempt to get into the vacant dock. The clerk to the 
Justices repeated the oath with incredible rapidity. 

“ Right O,” said Mr. Polly, but quite respectfully, and 
kissed the book. 

His evidence was simple and quite audible after one 
warning from the superintendent of police to “ speak 
up.” He tried to put in a good word for Parsons by 
saying he was “ naturally of a choleraic disposition,” but 
the start and the slow grin of enjoyment upon the face 
of the grave and Reverend Signor with the palatial 
Bokoo ” suggested that the word was not so good as he 
had thought it. The rest of the bench was frankly puz- 
zled and there were hasty consultations. 

“ You mean E as a Ot temper,” said the presiding 
magistrate. 

“ I mean E As a Ot temper,” replied Polly, magically 
incapable of aspirates for the moment. 

“ You don’t mean E ketches cholera.” 

“ I mean — he’s easily put out.” 

“ Then why can’t you say so ? ” said the presiding 
magistrate. 

Parsons was bound over. 

He came for his luggage while every one was in the 
shop, and Garvace would not let him invade the business 


THE DISMISSAL OF PARSONS 


39 


to say good-bye. When Mr. Polly went upstairs for 
margarine and bread and tea, he slipped on into the 
dormitory at once to see what was happening further in 
the Parsons case. But Parsons had vanished. There 
was no Parsons, no trace of Parsons. His cubicle was 
swept and garnished. For the first time in his life Polly 
had a sense of irreparable loss. 

A minute or so after Platt dashed in. 

“ Ugh ! ” he said, and then discovered Polly. Polly 
was leaning out of the window and did not look around. 
Platt went up to him. 

“ He’s gone already,” said Platt. “ Might have stopped 
to say good-bye to a chap.” 

There was a little pause before Polly replied. He 
thrust his finger into his mouth and gulped. 

“ Bit on that beastly tooth of mine,” he said, still not 
looking at Platt. “ It’s made my eyes water, something 
chronic. Any one might think I’d been doing a blooming 
Pipe, by the look of me.” 


CHAPTER THE THIRD 


CRIBS 

I 


v/ 


P ORT BURDOCK was never the safne place for 
Mr. Polly after Parsons had left it. There was 
no chest notes in his occasional letters, and little of 
the “ Joy de Vive ” got through by them. Parsons had 
gone, he said, to London, and found a place as warehouse- 
man in a cheap outfitting shop near St. Paul’s Church- 
yard, where references were not required. It became ap- 
parent as time passed that new interests were absorbing 
him. He wrote of socialism and the rights of man, things 
that had no appeal for Mr. Polly. He felt strangers had 
got hold of his Parsons, were at work upon him, making 
him into someone else, soething less picturesque. . . . 

Port Burdock became a dreariness full of faded memories 
of Parsons and work a bore. Platt revealed himself alone 
as a tiresome companion, obsessed by romantic ideas 
about intrigues and vices and “ society women.” 

Mr. Polly’s depression manifested itself in a general 
slackness. A certain impatience in the manner of Mr. 
Garvace presently got upon his nerves. Relations were 
becoming strained. He asked for a raise of salary to 
test his position, and gave notice to leave when it was 
refused. 


40 


CRIBS 


4i 


It took him two months to place himself in another 
situation, and during that time he had quite a disagree- 
able amount of loneliness, disappointment, anxiety and 
humiliation. 

He went at first to stay with a married cousin who had 
a house at Easewood. His widowed father had recently 
given up the music and bicycle shop (with the post of 
organist at the parish church) that had sustained his 
home, and was living upon a small annuity as a guest 
with this cousin, and growing a little tiresome on account 
of some mysterious internal discomfort that the local 
practitioner diagnosed as imagination. He had aged 
with mysterious rapidity and become excessively irri- 
table, but the cousin’s wife was a born manager, and 
contrived to get along with him. Our Mr. Polly’s status 
was that of a guest pure and simple, but after a fortnight 
of congested hospitality in which he wrote nearly a hun- 
dred letters beginning: 

Sir: 

Referring to your advt. in the “ Christian World ” for 
an improver in Gents' outfitting I beg to submit myself 
for the situation. Have had six years' experience. . . . 

and upset a bottle of ink over a toilet cover and the bed- 
room carpet, his cousin took him for a walk and pointed 
out the superior advantages of apartments in London 
from which to swoop upon the briefly yawning vacancy. 

“Helpful,” said Mr. Polly; “ very helpful, O’ man in- 
deed. I might have gone on there for weeks,” and 
packed. 


42 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


He got a room in an institution that was partly a 
benevolent hostel for men in his circumstances and partly 
a high minded but forbidding coffee house and a centre 
for pleasant Sunday afternoons. Mr. Polly spent a 
critical but pleasant Sunday afternoon in a back seat, 
inventing such phrases as : 

“ Soulful Owner of the Exorbitant Lar genial Devel- 
opment.” — An Adam’s Apple being in question. 

“ Earnest Joy.” 

“ Exultant, Urgent Loogoobuosity.” 

A manly young curate, marking and misunderstanding 
his preoccupied face and moving lips, came and sat by 
him and entered into conversation with the idea of mak- 
ing him feel more at home. The conversation was awk- 
ward and disconnected for a minute or so, and then 
suddenly a memory of the Port Burdock Bazaar occurred 
to Mr. Polly, and with a baffling whisper of “ Lill’ dog,” 
and a reassuring nod, he rose up and escaped, to wander 
out relieved and observant into the varied London streets. 

He found the collection of men he found waiting about 
in wholesale establishments in Wood Street and St. Paul’s 
Churchyard (where they interview the buyers who have 
come up from the country) interesting and stimulating, 
but far too strongly charged with the suggestion of his 
own fate to be really joyful. There were men in all de- 
grees between confidence and distress, and in every stage 
between extravagant smartness and the last stages of 
decay. There were sunny young men full of an abound- 
ing and elbowing energy, before whom the soul of Polly 


CRIBS 


43 


sank in hate and despair. “ Smart Juniors/’ said Polly to 
himself, “ full of Smart Juniosity. The Shoveacious 
Cult.” There were hungry looking individuals of thirty- 
five or so that he decided must be “ Proleteleriaws ” — 
he had often wanted to find someone who fitted that at- 
tractive word. Middle-aged men, “ too Old at Forty,” 
discoursed in the waiting rooms on the outlook in the 
trade, it had never been so bad, they said, while Mr. Polly 
wondered if “ De- juiced ” was a permissible epithet. 
There were men with an overweening sense of their im- 
portance, manifestly annoyed and angry to find them- 
selves still disengaged, and inclined to suspect a plot, and 
men so faint-hearted one was terrified to imagine their 
behaviour when it came to an interview. There was a 
fresh faced young man with an unintelligent face who 
seemed to think himself equipped against the world be- 
yond all misadventure by a collar of exceptional height, 
and another who introduced a note of gaiety by wearing 
a flannel shirt and a check suit of remarkable virulence. 
Every day Mr. Polly looked round to mark how many 
of the familiar faces had gone, and the deepening 
anxiety (reflecting his own) on the faces that remained, 
and every day some new type joined the drifting shoal. 
He realised how small a chance his poor letter from 
Esher ran against this hungry cluster of competitors at 
the fountain head. 

At the back of Mr. Polly’s mind while he made his ob- 
servations was a disagreeable flavour of dentist’s par- 
lour. At any moment his name might be shouted, and 
he might have to haul himself into the presence of some 


44 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


fresh specimen of employer, and to repeat once more his 
passionate protestation of interest in the business, his 
posession of a capacity for zeal — zeal on behalf of any- 
one who would pay him a yearly salary of twenty-six 
pounds a year. 

The prospective employer would unfold his ideals of 
the employee. “ I want a smart, willing young man, 
thoroughly willing — who won’t object to take trouble. I 
don’t want a slacker, the sort of fellow who has to be 
pushed up to his work and held there. I’ve got no use 
for him.” 

At the back of Mr. Polly’s mind and quite beyond his 
control, the insubordinate pharsemaker would be prof- 
fering such combinations as “ Chubby Chops,” or 
“ Chubby Charmer,” as suitable for the gentleman, very 
much as a hat salesman proffers hats. 

“ I don’t think you’d find much slackness about me, 
sir,” said Mr. Polly brightly, trying to disregard his 
deeper self. 

“ I want a young man who means getting on.” 

“ Exactly, sir. Excelsior.” 

“ I beg your pardon ? ” 

“ I said excelsior, sir. It’s a sort of motto of mine. 
From Longfellow. Would you want me to serve 
through ? ” 

The chubby gentleman explained and reverted to his 
ideals, with a faint air of suspicion. “ Do' you mean get- 
ting on ? ” he asked. 

“ I hope so, sir,” said Mr. Polly. 

“ Get on or get out, eh ? ” 


CRIBS 


45 

Mr. Polly made a rapturous noise, nodded appreciation, 
and said indistinctly : “ Quite my style.” 

“ Some of my people have been with me twenty years,” 
faid the employer. “ My Manchester buyer came to me 
as a boy of twelve. You’re a Christian? ” 

“ Church of England,” said Mr. Polly. 

“ H’m,” said the employer a little checked. “ For good 
all round business work I should have preferred a Bap- 
tist. Still — * — ” 

He studied Mr. Polly’s tie, which was severely neat 
and businesslike, as became an aspiring outfitter. Mr. 
Polly’s conception of his own pose and expression was 
rendered by that uncontrollable phrasemonger at the 
back as “ Obsequies Deference.” 

“ I am inclined,” said the prospective employer in a 
conclusive manner, “ to look up your reference.” 

Mr. Polly stood up abruptly. 

“ Thank you,” said the employer and dismissed him. 

“ Chump chops ! How about chump chops ? ” said the 
phrasemonger with an air of inspiration. 

“ I hope then to hear from you, sir,” .said Mr. Polly 
in his best salesman manner. 

“If everything is satisfactory,” said the prospective 
employer. 

II 

A man whose brain devotes its hinterland to making 
odd phrases and nicknames out of ill conceived words, 
whose conception of life is a lump of auriferous rock to 
which all the value is given by rare veins of unbusiness- 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


46 

like joy, who reads Boccaccio and Rabelais and Shakes- 
peare with gusto, and uses “ Stertorane.ous Chover ” and 
“ Smart Junior” as terms of bitterest opprobium, is not 
likely to make a great success under modern business 
conditions. Mr. Polly dreamt always of picturesque and 
mellow things, and had an instinctive hatred of the 
strenuous life. He would have resisted the spell of ex- 
President Roosevelt, or General Baden Powell, or Mr. 
Peter Keary, or the late Dr. Samuel Smiles, quite easily ; 
and he loved Falstaff and Hudibras and coarse laughter, 
and the old England of Washington Irving and the mem- 
ory of Charles the Second’s courtly days. His progress 
was necessarily slow. He did not get rises ; he lost situa- 
tions ; there was something in his eye employers did not 
like ; he would have lost his places oftener if he had not 
been at times an exceptionally brilliant salesman, rather 
carefully neat, and a slow but very fair window-dresser. 

He went from situation to situation, he invented a 
great wealth of nicknames, he conceived enmities and 
made friends — but none so richly satisfying as Parsons. 
He was frequently but mildly and discursively in love, 
and sometimes he thought of that girl who had given 
him a yellow-green apple. He had an idea, amounting 
to a flattering certainty, whose youthful freshness it was 
had stirred her to self-forgetfulness. And sometimes he 
thought of Foxbourne sleeping prosperously in the sun. 
And he began to have moods of discomfort and lassitude 
and ill temper due to the beginnings of indigestion. 

Various forces and suggestions came into his life and 
swayed him for longer and shorter periods. 


CRIBS 


47 

He went to Canterbury and came under the influence 
of Gothic architecture. There was a blood affinity be- 
tween Mr. Polly and the Gothic; in the middle ages he 
would no doubt have sat upon a scaffolding and carved 
out penetrating and none too flattering portraits of 
church dignitaries upon the capitals, and when he 
strolled, with his hands behind his back, along the 
cloisters behind the cathedral, and looked at the rich 
grass plot in the centre, he had the strangest sense of 
being at home — far more than he had ever been at home 
before. “ Portly capons,” he used to murmur to himself, 
under the impression that he was naming a characteristic 
type of medieval churchman. 

He liked to sit in the nave during the service, and look 
through the great gates at the candles and choristers, and 
listen to the organ sustained voices, but the transepts he 
never penetrated because of the charge for admission. 
The music and the long vista of the fretted roof filled 
him with a vague and mystical happiness that he had no 
words, even mispronounceable words, to express. But 
some of the smug monuments in the aisles got a wreath 
of epithets ; Metrorious urnfuls,” " funererial claims,” 
“ dejected angelosity” for example. He wandered about 
the precincts and speculated about the people who lived 
in the ripe and cosy houses of grey stone that cluster 
there so comfortably. Through green doors in high 
stone walls he caught glimpses of level lawns and blazing 
flower beds ; mullioned windows revealed shaded reading 
lamps and disciplined shelves of brown bound books. 
Now and then a dignitary in gaiters would pass him 


48 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

“ Portly capon ” or a drift of white robed choir boys 
cross a distant arcade and vanish in a doorway, or the 
pink and cream of some girlish dress flit like a butterfly 
across the cool still spaces of the place. Particularly he 
responded to the ruined arches of the Benedictine’s In- 
firmary and the view of Bell Harry tower from the school 
buildings. He was stirred to read the Canterbury Tales, 
but he could not get on with Chaucer’s old fashioned 
English, it fatigued his attention, and he would have 
given all the story telling very readily for a few adven- 
tures on the road. He wanted these nice people to live 
more and yarn less. He liked the Wife of Bath very 
much. He would have liked to have known that woman. 

At Canterbury, too, he first to his knowledge saw 
Americans. 

His shop did a good class trade in Westgate Street, 
and he would see them go by on the way to stare at 
Chaucer’s “ Chequers ” and then turn down Mercery 
Lane to Prior Goldstone’s gate. It impressed him that 
they were always in a kind of quiet hurry, and very de- 
termined and methodical people, — much more so than 
any English he knew. 

“ Cultured Rapacicity,” he tried. 

“ Boro cions Return to the Heritage.” 

He would expound them incidentally to his attendant 
apprentices. He had overheard a little lady putting her 
view to a friend near the Christchurch gate. The ac- 
cent and intonation had hung in his memory, and he 
would reproduce them more or less accurately. “ Now 
does this Marlowe monument really and truly matter f ” 


CRIBS 


49 


he had heard the little lady enquire. “ We’ve no time 
for side shows and second rate stunts, Mamie. We want 
just the Big Simple Things of the place, just the Broad 
Elemental Canterbury proposition. What is it saying 
to us? I want to get right hold of that, and then have 
tea in the very room that Chaucer did, and hustle to get 
that four-eighteen train back to London.” 

He would go over these precious phrases, finding them 
full of an indescribable flavour. “ Just the broad ele- 
mental Canterbury proposition,” he would repeat. . . . 

He would try to imagine Parsons confronted with 
Americans. For his own part he knew himself to be 
altogether inadequate. . . . 

Canterbury was the most congenial situation Mr. Polly 
ever found during these wander years, albeit a very 
desert so far as companionship went. 

Ill 

It was after Canterbury that the universe became really 
disagreeable to Mr. Polly. It was brought home to him 
not so much vividly as with a harsh and ungainly in- 
sistence that he was a failure in his trade. It was not the 
trade he ought to have chosen, though what trade he 
ought to have chosen was by no means clear. 

He made great but irregular efforts and produced a 
forced smartness that, like a cheap dye, refused to stand 
sunshine. He acquired a sort of parsimony also, in 
which acquisition he was helped by one or two phases of 
absolute inpecuniosity. But he was hopeless in com-' 


50 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


petition against the naturally gifted, the born hustlers, 
the young men who meant to get on. 

He left the Canterbury place very regretfully. He 
and another commercial gentleman took a boat one Sun- 
day afternoon at Sturry-on-the-Stour, when the wind 
was in the west, and sailed it very happily eastward for 
an hour. They had never sailed a boat before and it 
seemed simple and wonderful. When they turned they 
found the river too narrow for tacking and the tide run- 
ning out like a sluice. They battled back to Sturry in 
the course of six hours (at a shilling the first hour and 
sixpence for each hour afterwards) rowing a mile in an 
hour and a half or so, until the turn of the tide came to 
help them, and then they had a night walk to Canter- 
bury, and found themselves remorselessly locked out. 

The Canterbury employer was an amiable, religious- 
spirited man and he would probably not have dismissed 
Mr. Polly if that unfortunate tendency to phrase things 
had not shocked him. “ A Tide's a Tide, Sir," said Mr. 
Polly, feeling that things were not so bad. “ I've no 
lune-attic power to alter that.” 

It proved impossibe to explain to the Canterbury em- 
ployer that this was not a highly disrespectful and blas- 
phemous remark. 

“ And besides, what good are you to me this morning, 
do you think?" said the Canterbury employer, “with 
your arms pulled out of their sockets ? " 

So Mr. Polly resumed his observations in the Wood 
Street warehouses once more, and had some dismal times. 


CRIBS 


5 1 

The shoal of fish waiting for the crumbs of employment 
seemed larger than ever. 

He took counsel with himself. Should he “ chuck ” 
the outfitting? It wasn’t any good for him now, and 
presently when he was older and his youthful smartness 
had passed into the dulness of middle age it would be 
worse. What else could he do? 

Fie could think of nothing. He went one night to a 
music hall and developed a vague idea of a comic per- 
formance; the comic men seemed violent rowdies and 
not at all funny; but when he thought of the great pit of 
the audience yawning before him lie realised that his was 
an altogether too delicate talent for such a use. He was 
impressed by the charm of selling vegetables by auction in 
one of those open shops near London Bridge, but ad- 
mitted upon reflection his general want of technical 
knowledge. He made some enquiries about emigration, 
but none of the colonies were in want of shop assistants 
without capital. He kept up his attendance in Wood 
Street. 

He subdued his ideal of salary by the sum of five 
pounds a year, and was taken at that into a driving es- 
tablishment in Clapham, which dealt chiefly in ready- 
made suits, fed its assistants in an underground dining- 
room and kept them until twelve on Saturdays. He 
found it hard to be cheerful there. His fits of indiges- 
tion became worse, and he began to lie awake at night 
and think. Sunshine and laughter seemed things lost for 
ever ; picnics and shouting the moonlight. 

The chief shopwalker took a dislike to him and nagged 


52 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


him. “ Nar then Polly!” “Look alive Polly!” be- 
came the burthen of his days. “ As smart a chap as you 
could have,” said the chief shopwalker, “ but no Zest. 
No Zest! No Vim! What’s the matter with you? ” 

During his night vigils Mr. Polly had a feeling 

A young rabbit must have very much the feeling, when 
after a youth of gambolling in sunny woods and furtive 
jolly raids upon the growing wheat and exciting trium- 
phant bolts before ineffectual casual dogs, it finds itself 
at last for a long night of floundering effort and per- 
plexity, in a net — for the rest of its life. 

He could not grasp what was wrong with him. He 
made enormous efforts to diagnose his case. Was he 
really just a “ lazy slacker ” who ought to “ buck up ” ? 
He couldn’t find it in him to believe it. He blamed his 
father a good deal — it is what fathers are for — in put- 
ting him to a trade he wasn’t happy to follow, but he 
found it impossible to say what he ought to have fol- 
lowed. He felt there had been something stupid about his 
school, but just where that came in he couldn’t say. He 
made some perfectly sincere efforts to “ buck up ” and 
“ shove ” ruthlessly. But that was infernal — impossible. 
He had to admit himself miserable with all the misery of 
a social misfit, and with no clear prospect of more than 
the most incidental happiness ahead of him. And for all 
his attempts at self-reproach or self-discipline he felt at 
bottom that he wasn’t at fault. 

As a matter of fact all the elements of his troubles had 
been adequately diagnosed by a certain high-browed, 
spectacled gentleman living at Highbury, wearing a gold 


CRIBS 


53 


pince-nez, and writing for the most part in the beautiful 
library of the Reform Club. This gentleman did not 
know Mr. Polly personally, but he had dealt with him 
generally as “ one of those ill-adjusted units that abound 
in a society that had failed to develop a collective intelli- 
gence and a collective will for order, commensurate with 
its complexities.” 

But phrases of that sort had no appeal for Mr. Polly. 


CHAPTER THE FOURTH 


MR. POLLY AN ORPHAN 


I 


HEN a great change was brought about in the 



life of Mr. Polly by the death of his father. 


JL His father had died suddenly — the local practi- 
tioner still clung to his theory that it was imagination he 
suffered from, but comprised in the certificate with the 
appendicitis that was then so fashionable — and Mr. Polly 
found himself heir to a debateful number of pieces of 
furniture in the house of his cousin near Easewood 
Junction, a family Bible, an engraved portrait of Gari- 
baldi or a bust of Mr. Gladstone, an invalid gold watch, 
a gold locket formerly belonging to his mother, some 
minor jewelry and bric-a-brac, a quantity of nearly 
valueless old clothes and an insurance policy and money 
in the bank amounting altogether to the sum of three 
hundred and ninety-five pounds. 

Mr. Polly had always regarded his father as an im- 
mortal, as an eternal fact, and his father being of a re- 
served nature in his declining years had said nothing 
about the insurance policy. Both wealth and bereave- 
ment therefore took Mr. Polly by surprise and found him 
a little inadequate. His mother's death had been a 
childish grief and long forgotten, and the strongest af- 


54 


MR. POLLY AN ORPHAN 


55 


fection in his life had been for Parsons. An only child 
of sociable tendencies necessarily turns his back a good 
deal upon home, and the aunt who had succeeded his 
mother was an economist and furniture polisher, a 
knuckle rapper and sharp silencer, no friend for a slov- 
enly little boy. He had loved other little boys and girls 
transitorily, none had been frequent and familiar enough 
to strike deep roots in his heart, and he had grown up 
with a tattered and dissipated affectionateness that was 
becoming wildly shy. His father had always ben a 
stranger, an irritable stanger with exceptional powers of A f 
intervention and comment, and an air of being disap- 
pointed about his offspring. It was shocking to lose him ; 
it was like an unexpected hole in the universe, and the 
writing of “ Death ” upon the sky, but it did not tear 
Mr. Polly’s heartstrings at first so much as rouse him to 
a pitch of vivid attention. 

He came down to the cottage at Easewood in response 
to an urgent telegram, and found his father already 
dead. His cousin Johnson received him with much sol- 
emnity and ushered him upstairs, to look at a stiff, 
straight, shrouded form, with a face unwontedly quiet 
and, as it seemed, with its punched nostrils, scornful. 

“ Looks peaceful,” said Mr. Polly, disregarding the 
scorn to the best of his ability. 

“ It was a merciful relief,” said Mr. Johnson. 

There was a pause. 

“ Second Second Departed I’ve ever seen. Not 

counting mummies,” said Mr. Polly, feeling it necessary 
to say something. 


56 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

“ We did all we could.” 

“ No doubt of it, O’ man,” said Mr. Polly. 

A second long pause followed, and then to Mr. Polly’s 
great relief Johnson moved towards the door. 

Afterwards Mr. Polly went for a solitary walk in the 
evening light, and as he walked suddenly his dead father 
became real to him. He thought of things far away 
down the perspective of memory, of jolly moments when 
his father had skylarked with a wildly excited little boy,, 
of a certain annual visit to the Crystal Palace pantomime, 
full of trivial glittering incidents and wonders, of his 
father’s dread back while customers were in the old, 
minutely known shop. It is curious that the memory which 
seemed to link him nearest to the dead man was the 
memory of a fit of passion. His father had wanted to 
get a small sofa up the narrow winding staircase from 
the little room behind the shop to the bedroom above, and 
it had jammed. For a time his father had coaxed, and 
then groaned like a soul in torment and given way to 
blind fury, had sworn, kicked and struck at the offending 
piece of furniture and finally wrenched it upstairs, with 
considerable incidental damage to lathe and plaster and 
one of the castors. That moment when self-control was 
altogether torn aside, the shocked discovery of his 
father’s perfect humanity, had left a singular impression 
on Mr. Polly’s queer mind. It was as if something ex- 
travagantly vital had come out of his father and laid a 
warmly passionate hand upon his heart. He remembered 
that now very vividly, and it became a clue to endless 


MR. POLLY AN ORPHAN 


57 

other memories that had else been dispersed and confus- 
ing. 

A weakly wilful being struggling to get obdurate 
things round impossible corners — in that symbol Mr. 
Polly could recognise himself and all the trouble of 
humanity. 

He hadn’t had a particularly good time, poor old chap, 
and now it was all over. Finished. . . . 

Johnson was the sort of man who derives great satis- 
faction from a funeral, a melancholy, serious, practical 
minded man of five and thirty, with great powers of ad- 
vice. He was the up-line ticket clerk at Easewood Junc- 
tion, and felt the responsibilities of his position. He was 
naturally thoughtful and reserved, and greatly sustained 
in that by an innate rectitude of body and an overhanging 
and forward inclination of the upper part of his face and 
head. He was pale but freckled, and his dark grey eyes 
were deeply set. His lightest interest was cricket, but 
he did not take that lightly. His chief holiday was to go 
to a cricket match, which he did as if he w^ going to 
church, and he watched critically, applauded sparingly, 
and was darkly offended by any unorthodox play. His 
convictions upon all subjects were taciturnly inflexible. 
He was an obstinate player of draughts and chess, and 
an earnest and persistent reader of the British Weekly. 
His wife was a pink, short, wilfully smiling, managing, 
ingratiating, talkative woman, who was determined to 
be pleasant, and take a bright hopeful view of every- 
thing, even when it was not really bright and hopeful. 
She had large blue expressive eyes and a round face, 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


58 

and she always spoke of her husband as Harold. She 
addressed sympathetic and considerate remarks about the 
deceased to Mr. Polly in notes of brisk encouragement. 
“ He was really quite cheerful at the end,” she said sev- 
eral times, with congratulatory gusto, “ quite cheerful.” 

She made dying seem almost agreeable. 

Both these people were resolved to treat Mr. Polly 
very well, and to help his exceptional incompetence in 
every possible way, and after a simple supper of ham and 
bread and cheese and pickles and cold apple tart and 
small beer had been cleared away, they put him into the 
armchair almost as though he was an invalid, and sat on 
chairs that made them look down on him, and opened a 
directive discussion of the arrangements for the funeral. 
After all a funeral is a distinct social opportunity, and 
rare when you have no family and few relations, and they 
did not want to see it spoilt and wasted. 

“ You’ll have a hearse of course,” said Mrs. Johnson. 
“ Not one of them combinations with the driver sitting 
on the coffin. Disrespectful I think they are. I can’t 
fancy how people can bring themselves to be buried in 
combinations.” She flattened her voice in a manner she 
used to intimate aesthetic feeling. “ I do like them glass 
hearses,” she said. “ So refined and nice they are.” 

“ Podgter’s hearse you’ll have,” said: Johnson con- 
clusively. “ It’s the best in Easewood.” 

“ Everything that’s right and proper,” said Mr. Polly. 

“ Podger’s ready to come and measure at any time,” 
said Johnson. 

“ Then you’ll want a mourner’s carriage or two, ac- 


MR. POLLY AN ORPHAN 


59 

cording as to whom you’re going to invite,” said Mr. 
Johnson. 

“ Didn’t think of inviting any one,” said Polly. 

“ Oh ! you’ll have to ask a few friends,” said Mr. John- 
son. “ You can’t let your father go to his grave without 
asking a few friends.” 

“ Funerial baked meats I like,” said Mr. Polly. 

“ Not baked, but of course you’ll have to give them 
something. Ham and chicken’s very suitable. You don’t 
want a lot of cooking with the ceremony coming into the 
middle of it. I wonder who Alfred ought to invite, 
Plarold. Just the immediate relations; one doesn’t want 
a great crowd of people and one doesn’t want not to 
show respect.” 

“ But he hated our relations — most of them.” 

“ He’s not hating them now ” said Mrs. Johnson, “ you 
may be sure of that. It’s just because of that I think 
they ought to come — all of them — even your aunt Mil- 
dred.” 

“ Bit vulturial, isn’t it?” said Mr. Polly unheeded. 

“Wouldn’t be more than twelve or thirteen people if 
they all came,” said Mr. Johnson. 

“ We could have everything put out ready in the back 
room and the gloves and whiskey in the front room, and 
while we were all at the ceremony, Bessie could bring it 
all into the front room on a tray and put it out nice and 
proper. There’d have to be whiskey and sherry or port 
for the ladies. . . .” 

“ Where’ll you get your mourning? ” asked Johnson 
abruptly. 


6o 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


Mr. Polly had not yet considered this by-product of 
sorrow. “ Haven’t thought of it yet, O’ man.” 

A disagreeable feeling spread over his body as though 
he was blackening as he sat. He hated black garments. 

“ I suppose I must have mourning,” he said. 

" Well!” said Johnson with a solemn smile. 

“ Got to see it through,” said Mr. Polly indistinctly. 

“ If I were you,” said Johnson, “ I should get ready- 
made trousers. That’s all you really want. And a black 
satin tie and a top hat with a deep mourning band. And 
gloves.” 

“ Jet cuff links he ought to have — as chief mourner,” 
said Mrs. Johnson. 

“ Not obligatory,” said Johnson. 

“ It shows respect,” said Mrs. Johnson. 

“ It shows respect of course,” said Johnson. 

And then Mrs. Johnson went on with the utmost gusto 
to the details of the “ casket,” while Mr. Polly sat more 
and more deeply and droopingly into the armchair, as- 
senting with a note of protest to all they said. After he 
had retired for the night he remained for a long time 
perched on the edge of the sofa which was his bed, star- 
ing at the prospect before him. “ Chasing the O’ man 
about up to the last,” he said. 

He hated the thought and elaboration of death as a 
healthy animal must hate it. His mind struggled with 
unwonted social problems. 

“ Got to put ’em away somehow,” I suppose, said Mr. 
Polly. 


MR. POLLY AN ORPHAN 61 

“ Wish I’d looked him up a bit more while he was 
alive,” said Mr. Polly. 

II 

Bereavement came to Mr. Polly before the realisation 
of opulence and its anxieties and responsibilities. That 
only dawned upon him on the morrow — which chanced 
to be Sunday — as he walked with Johnson before church 
time about the tangle of struggling building enterprise 
that constituted the rising urban district of Easewood. 
Johnson was off duty that morning, and devoted the time 
very generously to the admonitory discussion of Mr. 
Polly’s worldly outlook. 

“ Don’t seem to get the hang of the business some- 
how,” said Mr. Polly. “ Too much blooming humbug 
in it for my way of thinking.” 

“ If I were you,” said Mr. Johnson, “ I should push 
for a first-class place in London — take almost nothing 
and live on my reserves. That’s what I should do.” 

“ Come the Heavy,” said Mr. Polly. 

“ Get a better class reference.” 

There was a pause. “ Think of investing your 
money? ” asked Johnson. 

“ Hardly got used to the idea of having it yet, O’ 
man.” 

“ You’ll have to do something faith it. Give you nearly 
twenty pounds a year if you invest it properly.” 

“ Haven’t seen it yet in that light,” said Mr. Polly 
defensively. 

“There’s no end of things you could put it into,” 


62 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


“ It’s getting it out again I shouldn’t feel sure of. I’m 
no sort of Fiancianier. Sooner back horses.” 

“ I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” 

“ Not my style, O’ man.” 

“ It’s a nest egg,” said Johnson. 

Mr. Polly made an indeterminate noise. 

“ There’s building societies,” Johnson threw out in a 
speculative tone. Mr. Polly, with detached brevity, ad- 
mitted there were. 

“ You might lend it on mortgage,” said Johnson. 
“ Very safe form of investment.” 

“ Shan’t think anything about it — not till the O’ man’s 
underground,” said Mr. Polly with an inspiration. 

They turned a corner that led towards the junction. 

“ Might do worse,” said Johnson, “ than put it into a 
small shop.” 

At the moment this remark made very little appeal to 
Mr. Polly. But afterwards it developed. It fell into 
his mind like some small obscure seed, and germinated. 

“ These shops aren’t in a bad position,” said Johnson. 

The row he referred to gaped in the late painful stage 
in building before the healing touch of the plasterer 
assuages the roughness of the brickwork. The space 
for the shop yawned an oblong gap below, framed above 
by an iron girder ; “ windows and fittings to suit tenant,” 
a board at the end of the row promised ; and behind 
was the door space and a glimpse of stairs going up to 
the living rooms above. “ Not a bad position,” said 
Johnson, and led the way into the establishment. “ Room 
for fixtures there,” he said, pointing to the blank wall. 


MR. POLLY AN ORPHAN 


63 

The two men went upstairs to the little sitting-room or 
best bedroom (it would have to be) above the shop. 
Then they descended to the kitchen below. 

“ Rooms in a new house always look a bit small,” 
said Johnson. 

They came out of the house again by the prospective 
back door, and picked their way through builder’s litter 
across the yard space to the road again. They drew 
nearer the junction to where a pavement and shops al- 
ready open and active formed the commercial centre 
of Easewood. On the opposite side of the way the side 
door of a flourishing little establishment opened, and a 
man and his wife and' a little boy in a sailor suit came 
into the street. The wife was a pretty woman in 
brown with a floriferous straw hat, and the group was 
altogether very Sundayfied and shiny and spick and 
span. The shop itself had a large plate-glass window 
whose contents were now veiled by a buff blind on which 
was inscribed in scrolly letters : “ Rymer, Pork Butcher 
and Provision Merchant,” and then with Voluptuous 
elaboration : “ The World Famed Easewood Sausage.” 

Greetings were exchanged between Mr. Johnson and 
this distinguished comestible. 

“Off to church already?” said Johnson. 

“ Walking across the fields to Little Dorington,” said 
Mr. Rymer. 

“ Very pleasant walk,” said Johnson. 

“ Very,” said Mr. Rymer. 

“ Hope you’ll enjoy it,” said Mr. Johnson. 


64 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


“ That chap’s done well,” said Johnson sotto voce as 
they went on. “ Came here with nothing — practically, 
four years ago. And as thin as a lath. Look at him 
now ! ” 

“ He’s worked hard of course,” said Johnson, improv- 
ing the occasion. 

Thought fell between the .cousins for a space. 

“ Some men can do one thing,” said Johnson, “ and 
some another. . . . For a man who sticks to it 

there’s a lot to be done in a shop.” 

Ill 

All the preparations for the funeral ran easily and 
happily under Mrs. Johnson’s skilful hands. On the 
eve of the sad event she produced a reserve of black 
sateen, the kitchen steps and a box of tintacks, and 
decorated the house with festoons and bows of black in 
the best possible taste. She tied up the knocker with 
black crape, and put a large bow over the corner of the 
steel engraving of Garibaldi*, and swathed the bust of 
Mr. Gladstone that had belonged to the deceased with 
inky swathings. She turned the two vases that had views 
of Tivoli and the Bay of Naples round, so that these 
rather brilliant landscapes were hidden and only the 
plain blue enamel showed, and she anticipated the long- 
contemplated purchase of a tablecloth for the front room, 
and substituted a violet purple cover for the now very 
worn and faded raptures and roses in plushette that had 


MR. POLLY AN ORPHAN 


65 

hitherto done duty there. Everything that loving con- 
sideration could do to impart a dignified solemnity to her 
little home was done. 

She had released Mr. Polly from the irksome duty of 
issuing invitations, and as the moments of assembly drew 
near she sent him and Mr. Johnson out into the narrow 
long strip of garden at the back of the house, to be free 
to put a finishing touch or so to her preparations. She 
sent them out together because she had a queer little 
persuasion at the back of her mind that Mr. Polly wanted 
to bolt from his sacred duties, and there was no way out 
of the garden except through the house. 

Mr. Johnson was a steady, successful gardener, and 
particularly good with celery and peas. He walked 
slowly along the narrow path down the centre pointing 
out to Mr. Polly a number of interesting points in the 
management of peas, wrinkles neatly applied and diffi- 
culties wisely overcome, and all that he did 1 for the 
comfort and propitiation of that fitful but rewarding 
vegetable. Presently a sound of nervous laughter and 
raised voices from the house proclaimed the arrival of 
the earlier guests, and the worst of that anticipatory ten- 
sion was over. 

When Mr. Polly re-entered the house he found three 
entirely strange young women with pink faces, demon- 
strative manners and emphatic mourning, engaged in an 
incoherent conversation with Mrs. Johnson. All three 
kissed him with great gusto after the ancient English 
fashion. “ These are your cousins Larkins,” said Mrs. 


66 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


Johnson; “that’s Annie (unexpected hug and smack), 
that’s Miriam (resolute hug and smack), and that’s Min- 
nie (prolonged hug and smack). 

“ Right-O,” said Mr. Polly, emerging a little crumpled 
and breathless from this hearty introduction. “ I see.” 

“ Here’s Aunt Larkins,” said Mrs. Johnson, as an 
eldery and stouter edition of the three young women 
appeared in the doorway. 

Mr. Polly backed rather faint-heartedly, but Aunt Lar- 
kins was not to be denied. Having hugged and kissed 
her nephew resoundingly she gripped him by the wrists 
and scanned his features. She had a round, sentimental, 
freckled face. “ I should ’ave known ’im anywhere,” 
she said with fervour. 

“ Hark at mother ! ” said the cousin called Annie. 
“ Why, she’s never set eyes on him before ! ” 

“ I should ’ave known ’im anywhere,” said Mrs. Lar- 
kins, “ for Lizzie’s child. You’ve got her eyes ! It’s 
a Resemblance! And as for never seeing ’im — I’ve dan- 
dled him, Miss Imperence. I’ve dandled him.” 

“You couldn’t dandle him now, Ma!” Miss Annie 
remarked with a shriek of laughter. 

All the sisters laughed at that. “ The things you 
say, Annie ! ” said Miriam, and for a time the room was 
full of mirth. 

Mr. Polly felt it incumbent upon him to say something. 
“My dandling days are over,” he said. 

The reception of this remark would have convinced a 
far more modest character than Mr. Polly that it was 
extremely witty. 


MR. POLLY AN ORPHAN 


67 

Mr. Polly followed it up by another one almost equally 
good. “ My turn to dandle/’ he said, with a sly look at 
his aunt, and convulsed everyone. 

“ Not me,” said Mrs. Larkins, taking his point, " thank 
you,” and achieved a climax. 

It was queer, but they seemed to be easy people to get 
on with anyhow. They were still picking little ripples 
and giggles of mirth from the idea of Mr. Polly dandling 
Aunt Larkins when Mr. Johnson, who had answered 
the door, ushered in a stooping figure, who was at once 
hailed by Mrs. Johnson as “ Why! Uncle Pentstemon! ” 
Uncle Pentstemon was rather a shock. His was an aged 
rather than venerable figure; Time had removed the 
hair from the top of his head and distributed a small 
dividend of the plunder in little bunches carelessly and 
impartially over the rest of his features, he was dressed 
in a very big old frock coat and a long cylindrical top 
hat, which he had kept on, he was very much bent, and 
he carried a rush basket from which protruded coy inti- 
mations of the lettuces and onions he had brought to 
grace the occasion. He hobbled into the room, resisting 
the efforts of Johnson to divest him of his various encum- 
brances, halted and surveyed the company with an ex- 
pression of profound hostility, breathing hard. Recog- 
nition quickened in his eyes. 

“ You here,” he said to Aunt Larkins and then; “ You 
would be. . . . These your gals ? ” 

“ They are,” said Aunt Larkins, “ and better gals ” 

“ That Annie ? ” asked Uncle Pentstemon, pointing a 
horny thumb-nail. 


68 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


“Fancy your remembering her name!” 

“ She mucked up my mushroom bed, the baggage ! ” 
said Uncle Pentstemon ungenially, “ and I give it to her 
to rigjhts. Trounced her I did — fairly. I remember 
her. Here’s some green stuff for you, Grace. Fresh 
it is and wholesome. I shall be wanting the basket back 
and mind you let me have it. . . . Have you nailed 

him down yet? You always was a bit in front of what 
was needful.” 

His attention was drawn inward by a troublesome 
tooth, and he sucked at it spitefully. Theresas some- 
thing potent about this old man that silenced everyone 
for a moment or so. He seemed a fragment from the 
ruder agricultural past of our race, like a lump of soil 
among things of paper. He put his basket of vegetables 
very deliberately on the new violet tablecloth, removed 
his hat carefully and dabbled his brow, and wiped out 
his hat brim with a crimson and yellow pocket handker- 
chief. 

“ I’m glad you were able to come, Uncle,” said Mrs. 
Johnson. 

“ Oh, I came ” said Uncle Pentstemon. “ I came.” 

He turned on Mrs. Larkins. “ Gals in service ? ” he 
asked. 

“ They aren’t and they won’t be,” said Mrs. Larkins. 

“ No,” he said with infinite meaning, and turned his 
eye on Mr. Polly. 

“ You Lizzie’s boy? ” he said. 

Mr. Polly was spared much self-exposition by the 
tumult occasioned by further arrivals. 


MR. POLLY AN ORPHAN 69 

“ Ah ! here’s May Punt ! ” said Mrs. Johnson, and a 
small woman dressed in the borrowed mourning of a 
large woman and leading a very small long-haired ob- 
servant little boy — it was his first funeral — appeared, 
closely followed by several friends of Mrs. Johnson who 
had come to swell the display of respect and made only 
vague, confused impressions upon Mr. Polly’s mind. 
(Aunt Mildred, who was an unexplained family scandal 
had declined Mrs. Johnson’s hospitality.) 

Everybody was in profound mourning, of course, 
mourning in the modern English style, with the dyer’s 
handiwork only too apparent, and hats and jackets of 
the current cut. There was very little crape, and the 
costumes had none of the goodness and specialisation 
and genuine enjoyment of mourning for mourning’s 
sake that a similar continental gathering would have 
displayed. Still that congestion of strangers in black 
sufficed to stun and confuse Mr. Polly’s impressionable 
mind. It seemed to him much more extraordinary than 
anything he had expected. 

“ Now, gals,” said Mrs. Larkins, “ see if you can 
help,” and the three daughters became confusingly active 
between the front room and the back. 

“ I hope everyone’ll take a glass of sherry and a bis- 
cuit,” said Mrs. Johnson. “ We don’t stand on cere- 
mony,” and a decanter appeared in the place of Uncle 
Pentstemon’s vegetables. 

Uncle Pentstemon had refused to be relieved of his 
hat, he sat stiffly down on a chair against the wall with 
that venerable headdress between his feet, watching the 


;o THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

approach of anyone jealously. “ Don’t you go squash- 
ing my hat,” he said. Conversation became confused 
and general. Uncle Pentstemon addressed himself to 
Mr. Polly. “ You’re a little chap,” he said, “ a puny 
little chap. I never did agree to Lizzie marrying him, 
but I suppose bygones must be bygones now. I suppose 
they made you a clerk or something.” 

“ Outfitter,” said Mr. Polly. 

“ I remember. Them girls pretend to be dress- 
makers.” 

“ They are dressmakers,” said Mrs. Larkins across 
the room. 

“ I will take a glass of sherry. They ’old to it, you 
see.” 

He took the glass Mrs. Johnson handed him, and 
poised it critically between a homy finger and thumb. 
“ You’ll be paying for this,’ ? he said to Mr. Polly. 
“ Here’s to you. . . . Don’t you go treading on my 
hat, young woman. You brush your skirts against it 
and you take a shillin’ off its value. It ain’t the sort of 
’at you see nowadays.” 

He drank noisily. 

The sherry presently loosened everybody’s tongue, and 
the early coldness passed. 

“ There ought to have been a post-mortem ” Polly 
heard Mrs. Punt remarking to one of Mrs. Johnson’s 
friends, and Miriam and another were lost in admiration 
of Mrs. Johnson’s decorations. “ So very nice and re- 
fined,” they were both repeating at intervals. 

The sherry and biscuits were still being discussed when 


MR. POLLY AN ORPHAN 


7 1 


Mr. Podger, the undertaker, arrived, a broad, cheerfully 
sorrowful, clean-shaven little man, accompanied by a 
melancholy- faced assistant. He conversed for a time 
with Johnson in the passage outside; the sense of his 
business stilled the rising waves of chatter and carried 
off everyone’s attention in the wake of his heavy foot- 
steps to the room above 


IV 

Things crowded upon Mr. Polly. Everyone, he 
noticed, took sherry with a solemn avidity, and a small 
portion even was administered sacramentally to the Punt 
boy. There followed a distribution of black kid gloves, 
and much trying on and humouring of fingers. " Good 
gloves,” said one of Mrs. Johnson’s friends. “ There’s 
a little pair there for Willie,” said Mrs. Johnson trium- 
phantly. Everyone Iseemed gravely content with the 
amazing procedure of the occasion. Presently Mr. Pod- 
ger was picking Mr. Polly out as Chief Mourner to go 
with Mrs. Johnson, Mrs. Larkins and Annie in the first 
mourning carriage. 

“ Right O,” said Mr. Polly, and repented instantly of 
the alacrity of the phrase. 

“ Ther0’ll have to be a walking party,” said Mrs. 
Johnson cheerfully. “ There’s only two coaches. I 
daresay we can put in six in each, but that leaves three 
over.” 

There was a generous struggle to be pedestrian, and 
the two other Larkins girls, confessing coyly to tight 


72 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


new boots and displaying a certain eagerness, were 
added to the contents of the first carriage. 

“ It’ll be a squeeze,” said Annie. 

“I don’t mind a squeeze,” said Mr. Polly. 

He decided privately that the proper phrase for the 
result of that remark was Hysteria l catechunations.” 

Mr. Podger re-entered the room from a momentary 
supervision of the bumping business that was now pro- 
ceeding down the staircase. 

“ Bearing up,” he said cheerfully, rubbing his hands 
together. “ Bearing up ! ” 

That stuck very vividly in Mr. Polly’s mind, and so 
did the close-wedged drive to the churchyard, bunched 
in between two young women in confused dull and shiny 
black, and the fact that the wind was bleak and that 
the officiating clergyman had a cold, and sniffed between 
his sentences. The wonder of life! The wonder of 
everything! What had he expected that this should 
all be so astoundingly different 

He found his attention converging more and more 
upon the Larkins cousins. The interest was reciprocal. 
They watched him with a kind of suppressed excitement 
and became risible with his every word and gesture. 
He was more and more aware of their personal quality. 
Annie had blue eyes and a red, attractive mouth, a harsh 
voice and a habit of extreme liveliness that even this 
occasion could not suppress ; Minnie was fond, extremely 
free about the touching of hands and suchlike endear- 
ments, Miriam was quieter and regarded him earnestly. 
Mrs. Larkins was very happy in her daughters, and they 


MR. POLLY AN ORPHAN 


73 


had the naive affecionaeness of .hose who see few peo- 
ple and find a strange cousin a wonderful outlet. Mr. 
Polly had never been very much kissed, and it made his 
mind swim. He did not know for the life of him whether 
he liked or disliked all or any of the Larkins cousins. 
It was rather attractive to make them laugh ; they laughed 
at anything. 

There they were tugging at his mind, and the funeral 
tugging at his mind, too, and the sense of himself as 
Chief Mourner in a brand new silk hat with a broad 
mourning band. He watched the ceremony and missed 
his responses, and strange feelings twisted at his heart- 
strings. 

V 

Mr. Polly walked back to the house because he wanted 
to be alone. Miriam and Minnie would have accom- 
panied him, but finding Uncle Pentstemon beside the 
Chief Mourner they went on in front. 

“ You’re wise,” said Uncle Pentstemon. 

“ Glad you think so,” said Mr. Polly, rousing himself 
to talk. 

“ I likes a bit of walking before a meal,” said Uncle 
Pentstemon, and made a kind of large hiccup. “ That 
sherry rises,” he remarked. “ Grocer’s s|uff, I expec.” 

He went on to ask how much the funeral might be 
costing, and seemed pleased to find Mr. Polly didn’t 
know. 

“ In that case,” he said impressively, “ it’s pretty cer- 
tain to cost more’n you expect, my boy.” 


74 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


He meditated for a time. “ I’ve seen a mort of un- 
dertakers,” he declared ; “ a mort of undertakers.” 

The Larkins girls attracted his attention. 

“ Let’s lodgin’s and chars,” he commented. “ Least- 
ways she goes out to cook dinners. And look at ’em ! ” 

“Dressed up to the nines. If it ain’t borryd clothes, 
that is. And they goes out to work at a factory ! ” 

“ Did you know my father much, Uncle Pentstemon ? ” 
asked Mr. Polly. 

“ Couldn’t stand Lizzie thro win’ herself away like 
that,” said Uncle Pentstemon, and repeated his hiccup 
on a larger scale. 

“ That weren't good sherry,” said Uncle Pentstemon 
with the first note of pathos Mr. Polly had detected in 
his quavering voice. 

The funeral in the rather cold wind had proved won- 
derfully appetising, and every eye brightened at the sight 
of the cold collation that was now spread in the front 
room. Mrs. Johnson was very brisk, and Mr. Polly, 
when he re-entered the house found everybody sitting 
down. “ Come along, Alfred,” cried the hostess cheer- 
fully. “ We can’t very well begin without you. Have 
you got he bottled beer ready to open, Betsy? Uncle, 
you’ll have a drop of whiskey, I expect.” 

“ Put it where I can mix for myself,” said Uncle 
Pentstemon, placing his hat very carefully out of harm’s 
way on the bookcase. 

There were two cold boiled chickens, which Johnson 
carved with great care and justice, and a nice piece of 
ham, some brawn and a steak and kidney pie, a large bowl 


MR. POLLY AN ORPHAN 


75 


of salad and several sorts of pickles, and afterwards 
came cold apple tart, jam roll and a good piece of Stil- 
ton cheese, lots of bottled beer, some lemonade for the 
ladies and milk for Master Punt; a very bright and 
satisfying meal. Mr. Polly found himself seated between 
Mrs. Punt, who was much preoccupied with Master 
Punt’s table manners, and one of Mrs. Johnson’s school 
friends, who was exchanging reminiscences of school 
days and news of how various common friends had 
changed and married with Mrs. Johnson. Opposite him 
was Miriam and another of the Johnson circle, and also 
he had brawn to carve and there was hardly room for 
the helpful Betsy to pass behind his chair, so that alto- 
gether his mind would have been amply distracted from 
any mortuary broodings, even if a wordy warfare about 
the education of the modern young woman had not 
sprung up between Uncle Pentstemon and Mrs. Larkins 
and threatened for a time, in spite of a word or so in 
season from Johnson, to wreck all the harmony of the 
sad occasion. 

The general effect was after this fashion: 

First an impression of Mrs. Punt on the right speaking 
in a refined undertone: “You didn’t, I suppose, Mr. 
Polly, think to ’ave your poor dear father post-mor- 
temed ” 

Lady on the left side breaking in: “I was just remind- 
ing Grace of the dear dead days beyond recall — . — ” 

Attempted reply to Mrs. Punt : “ Didn’t think of it 
for a moment. Can’t give you a piece of this brawn, 
can I?” 


76 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

Fragment from the left : “ Grace and Beauty they used 

to call us and we used to sit at the same desk ” 

Mrs. Punt, breaking out suddenly : “ Don’t swaller 
your fork, Willy. You see, Mr. Polly, I used to ’ave a 

young gentleman, a medical student, lodging with 

_ ** 

me 

Voice from down the table: “ ’Am, Alfred? I didn’t 
give you very much.” 

Betsy became evident at the back of Mr. Polly’s chair, 
struggling wildly to get past. Mr. Polly did his best 
to be helpful. “ Can you get past? Lemme sit forward 
a bit. Urr-oo! Right O.” 

Lady to the left going on valiantly and speaking to 
everyone who cares to listen, while Mrs. Johnson beams 
beside her : “ there she used to sit as bold as brass, and the 
fun she used to make of things no one could believe — 
knowing her now. She used to make faces at the mis- 
tress through the ■” 

Mrs. Punt keeping steadily on : “ The contents of the 
stummik at any rate ought to be examined.” 

Voice of ML Johnson*. “ Elfred, pass the mustid 
down.” 

Miriam leaning across the table : “ Eldrid ! ” 

“ Once she got us all kept in. The whole school ! ” 
Miriam, more insistently : “ Eldrid ! ” 

Uncle Pentstemon, raising his voice defiantly : 
“ Trounce ’er again I would if she did as much now. 
That I would ! Dratted mischief ! ” 

Miriam, catching Mr. Polly’s eye: “Elfrid! This 


MR. POLLY AN ORPHAN 77 

lady knows Canterbury. I been telling her you been 
there.” 

Mr. Polly : “ Glad you know it.” 

The laudy shouting : “I like it.” 

Mrs. Larkins, raising her voice : “ I won't 'ave my 
girls spoken of, not by nobody, old or young.” 

Pop! imperfectly located. 

Mr. Johnson at large : “ Ain't the beer up ! It’s the 
'eated room.” 

Betsy : “ Scuse me, sir, passing so soon again, but ” 

Rest inaudible. Mr. Polly, accommodating himself : 
“Urr-oo! Right? RightO.” 

The knives and forks, probably by some secret common 
agreement, clash and clatter together and drown every 
other sound. 

“ Nobody 'ad the least idea ’ow 'E died, — nobody. . . . 
Willie, don't golp so. You ain’t in a 'urry, are you? 
You don’t want to ketch a train or anything, — golping 
like that ! ” 

“ D’you remember, Grace, 'ow one day we 'ad writing 
lesson. . . .” 

“ Nicer girls no one ever 'ad — though I say it who 
shouldn’t.” 

Mrs. Johnson in a shrill clear hospitable voice : “ Rob- 
but, won’t Mrs. Larkins 'ave a teeny bit more fowl ? ” 
Mr. Polly rising to the situation. “ Or some brawn, 
Mrs. Larkins ? ” Catching Uncle Pentstemon’s eye : 
“ Can't send you some brawn, sir? ” 

“ Elfrid ! ” 


7 8 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


Loud hiccup from Uncle Pentstemon, momentary con- 
sternation followed by giggle from Annie. 

The narration at Mr. Polly’s elbow pursued a quiet 
but relentless course. Directly the new doctor came in 
he said : “ Everything must be took out and put in 

spirits — everything.” 

Willie, — audible ingurgitation. 

The narration on the left was flourishing up to a 
climax. “ Ladies,” she sez, “ dip their pens in their ink 
and keep their noses out of it ! ” 

“ Elf rid ! ” — persuasively. 

“ Certain people may cast snacks at other people’s 
daughters never having had any of their own though 
two poor souls of wives dead and buried through their 
goings on ” 

Johnson ruling the storm : “ We don’t want old scores 

dug up on such a day as this ” 

“ Old scores you may call them, but worth a dozen of 
them that put them to their rest poor dears.” 

“ Eldrid ! ” — with a note of remonstrance. 

“If you choke yourself my lord not another mouthful 
do you ’ave. No nice puddin’ ! Nothing! ” 

“ And kept us in, she did every afternoon for a week ! ” 
It seemed to be the end, and Mr. Polly replied with an 
air of being profoundly impressed : “ Really ! ” 

“ Elfrid ! ” — a little disheartened. 

“ And then they ’ad it ! They found he’d swallowed 

the very key to unlock the drawer ” 

“ Then don’t let people go casting snacks ! ” 


MR. POLLY AN ORPHAN 


79 


“ Who’s casting snacks ! ” 

“ Elfrid ! This lady wants to know, ’ave the Prossers 
left Canterbury ? ” 

“ No wish to make myself disagreeable not to God’s 
'umblest worm •” 

“ Alf, you aren’t very busy with that brawn up there ! ” 

And so on for the hour. 

The general effect upon Mr. Polly at the time was at 
once confusing and exhilerating ; but it led him to eat 
copiously and carelessly, and long before the end, when 
after an hour and a quarter a movement took the party, 
and it pushed away its cheese plates and rose sighing 
and stretching from the remains of the repast, little 
streaks and bands of dyspeptic irritation and melancholy 
were darkening the serenity of his mind. 

He stood between the mantel shelf and the window — 
the blinds were up now — and the Larkins sisters clustered 
about him. He battled with the oncoming depression and 
forced himself to be exteremely facetious about two 
noticeable rings on Annie’s hand. “ They ain’t real,” 
said Annie coquettishly. “ Got ’em out of a prize 
packet.” 

“ Prize packet in trousers, I expect,” said Mr. Polly, 
and awakened inextinguishable laughter. 

“ Oh ! the things you say ! ” said Minnie, slapping his 
shoulder. 

Suddenly something he had quite extraordinarily for- 
gotten came into his head. 

“ Bless my heart ! ” he cried, suddenly serious. 


8o 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


“ What’s the matter? ” asked Johnson. 

“ Ought to have gone back to shop — three days ago. 
They’ll make no end of a row ! ” 

“ Lor, you are a Treat! ” said cousin , and 

screamed with laughter at a delicious idea. “ You’ll get 
” she said. 

Feeling a little disorganized by her hilarity and a 
shocked expression that had come to the face of cousin 
Miriam, he made some indistinct excuse and went out 
through the back room and scullery into the little gar- 
den. The cool air and a very slight drizzle of rain was 
a relief — anyhow. But the black mood of the replete 
dyspeptic had come upon him. His soul darkened hope- 
lessly. He walked with his hands in his pockets down 
the path between the rows of exceptionally cultured peas 
and unreasonably, overwhelmingly, he was smitten by 
sorrow for his father. The heady noise and muddle and 
confused excitement of the feast passed from him like a 
curtain drawn away. He thought of that hot and angry 
and struggling creature who had tugged and sworn so 
foolishly at the sofa upon the twisted staircase, and who 
was now lying still and hidden, at the bottom of a 
wall-sided oblong pit beside the heaped gravel that would 
presently cover him. The stillness of it! the wonder of 
it ! the infinite reproach ! Hatred for all these people — 
all of them — possessed Mr. Polly’s soul. 

“ Hen-witted gigglers,” said Mr. Polly. 

He went down to the fence, and stood with his hands 
on it staring away at nothing. He stayed there for what 
seemed a long time. From the house came a sound of 


MR. POLLY AN ORPHAN 81 

raised voices that subsided, and then Mrs. Johnson call- 
ing for Betsy. 

" Gowlish gusto,” said Mr. Polly. “ Jumping it in. 
Funerial Games. Don’t hurt him of course. Doesn’t 
matter to him. . . 

Nobody missed Mr. Polly for a long time. 

When at last he reappeared among them his eye was 
almost grim, but nobody noticed his eye. They were 
looking at watches, and Johnson was being omniscent 
about trains. They seemed to discover Mr. Polly afresh 
just at the moment of parting, and said a number of 
more or less appropriate things. But Uncle Pentstemon 
was far too worried about his rush basket, which had 
been carelessly mislaid, he seemed to think with larcen- 
ous intentions, to remember Mr. Polly at all. Mrs. John- 
son had tried to fob him off with a similar but inferior 
basket, — his own had one handle mended with string 
according to a method of peculiar virtue and inimitable 
distinction known only to himself — and the old gentle- 
man had taken her attempt as the gravest reflection upon 
his years and intelligence. Mr. Polly was left very 
largely to the Larkins trio. Cousin Minnie became shame- 
less and kept kissing him good-bye — and then finding 
out it wasn’t time to go. Cousin Miriam seemed to 
think her silly, and caught Mr. Polly’s eye sympatheti- 
cally. Cousin Annie ceased to giggle and lapsed into a 
nearly sentimental state. She said with real feeling that 
she had enjoyed the funeral more than words could tell. 


CHAPTER THE FIFTH 

MR. PO’LY TAKES A VACATION 

I 

M R. POLLY returned to Chapham from the 
funeral celebration prepared for trouble, and 
took his dismissal in a manly spirit. 

“ You’ve merely anti -separated me by a hair,” he said 
politely. 

And he told them in the dormitory that he meant to 
take a little holiday before his next crib, though a certain 
inherited reticence suppressed the fact of the legacy. 

“ You’ll do that all fight,” said Ascough, the head of 
the boot shop. “ It’s quite the fashion just at present. 
Six Weeks in Wonderful Wood Street. They’re run- 
ning excursions. . . .” 

“ A little holiday ; ” that was the form his sense of 
wealth took first, that it made a little holiday possible. 
Holidays were his life, and the res merely adulterated 
living. And now he might take a little holiday and have 
money for railway fares and money for meals and money 
for inns. But He wanted someone to take the holi- 

day with. 

For a time he cherished a design of hunting up Par- 
sons, getting him to throw up his situation, and going 

82 


MR. POLLY TAKES A VACATION 83 

with him to Stratford-on-Avon and Shrewsbury and the 
Welsh mountains and the Wye and a lot of places like 
that, for a really gorgeous, careless, illimitable old holi- 
day of a month. But alas ! Parsons had gone from the 
St. Paul’s Churchyard outfitter’s long ago, and left no 
address. 

Mr. Polly tried to think he would be almost as happy 
wandering alone, but he knew better. He had dreamt 
of casual encounters with delightfully interesting peo- 
ple by the wayside — even romantic encounters. Such 
things happened in Chaucer and “ Bocashiew,” they hap- 
pened with extreme facility in Mr. Richard Le Gallienne’s 
very detrimental book, The Quest of the Golden Girl, 
which he had read at Canterbury, but he had no confi- 
dence they would happen in England — to him. 

When, a month later, he came out of the Clapham side 
door at last into the bright sunshine of a fine London 
day, with a dazzling sense of limitless freedom upon him, 
he did nothing more adventurous than order the cabman 
to drive to Waterloo, and there take a ticket for Ease- 
wood. 

He wanted — what did he want most in life? I think 
his distinctive craving is best expressed as fun — fun in 
companionship. He had already spent a pound or two 
upon three select feasts to his fellow assistants, sprat 
suppers they were, and there had been a great and very 
successful Sunday pilgrimage to Richmond, by Wands- 
worth and Wimbledon’s open common, a trailing garru- 
lous company walking about a solemnly happy host, to 
wonderful cold meat and salad at the Roebuck, a bowl of 


84 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

punch, punch ! and a bill to correspond ; but now it was a 
week-day, and he went down to Easewood with his bag 
and portmanteau in a solitary compartment, and looked 
out of the window upon a world in which every possible 
congenial seemed either toiling in a situation or else look- 
ing for one with a gnawing and hopelessly preoccupy- 
ing anxiety. He stared out of the window at the ex- 
ploitation roads of suburbs, and rows of houses all very 
much alike, either emphatically and impatiently to let 
or full of rather busy unsocial people. Near Wimbledon 
he had a glimpse of golf links, and saw two elderly gen- 
tlemen who, had they chosen, might have been gentlemen 
of grace and leisure, addressing themselves to smite little 
hunted white balls great distances with the utmost bit- 
terness and dexterity. Mr. Polly could not understand 
them. 

Every road he remarked, as freshly as though he had 
never observed it before, was bordered by inflexible pal- 
ings or iron fences or severely disciplined hedges. He 
wondered if perhaps abroad there might be beautifully 
careless, unenclosed high roads. Perhaps after all the 
best way of taking a holiday is to go abroad. 

He was haunted by the memory of what was either a 
half-forgotten picture or a dream ; a carriage was drawn 
up by the wayside and four beautiful people, two men 
and two women graciously dressed, were dancing a 
formal ceremonious dance full of bows and curtseys, to 
the music of a wandering fiddler they had encountered. 
They had been driving one way and he walking another 
— a happy encounter with this obvious result. They 


MR. POLLY TAKES A VACATION 85 

might have come straight out of happy Theleme, whose 
motto is : “ Do what thou wilt.” The driver had taken 
his two sleek horses out ; they grazed unchallenged ; and 
he sat on a stone clapping time with his hands while the 
fiddler played. The shade of the trees did not altogether 
shut out the sunshine, the grass in the wood was lush 
and full of still daffodils, the turf they danced on was 
starred with daisies. 

Mr. Polly, dear heart ! firmly believed that things like 
that could and did happen — somewhere. Only it puzzled 
him that morning that he never saw them happening. 
Perhaps they happened south of Guilford. Perhaps they 
happened in Italy. Perhaps they ceased to happen a 
hundred years ago. Perhaps they happend just round 
the comer — on weekdays when all good Mr. Pollys are 
safely shut up in shops. And so dreaming of delightful 
impossibiliies until his heart ached for them, he was 
rattled along in the suburban train to Johnson’s discreet 
home and the briskly stimulating welcome of Mrs. John- 
son. 

II 

Mr. Polly translated his restless craving for joy and 
leisure into Harold- Johnsonese by saying that he meant 
to look about him for a bit before goin into another situ- 
ation. It was a decision Johnson very warmly approved. 
It was arranged that Mr. Polly should occupy his former 
room and board with the Johnsons in consideration of a 
weekly payment of eighteen shillings. And the next 
morning Mr. Polly went out early and reappeared with 


86 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


a purchase, a safety bicycle which he proposed to study 
and master in the sandy lane below the Johnson’s house. 
But over the struggles that preceded his mastery it is 
humane to draw a veil. 

And also Mr. Polly bought a number of books, Rabe- 
lais for his own, and “ The Arabian Nights,” the works 
of Sterne, a pile of “ Tales from Blackwood,” cheap in 
a secondhand bookshop, the plays of William Shake- 
spear, a secondhand copy of Belloc’s “ Road to Rome,” 
an odd volume of “ Purchas his Pilgrimes ” and “ The 
Life and Death of Jason.” 

“ Better get yourself a good book on bookkeeping,” 
said Johnson, turning over perplexing pages. 

A belated spring was now advancing with great 
strides to make up for lost time. Sunshine and a stir- 
ring wind were poured out over the land, fleets of tower- 
ing clouds sailed upon urgent tremendous missions across 
the blue seas of heaven, and presently Mr. Polly was rid- 
ing a little unstably along unfamiliar Surrey roads, won- 
dering always what was round the next corner, and 
marking the blackthorn and looking out for the first 
white flowerbuds of the may. He was perplexed and 
distressed, as indeed are all right thinking souls, that 
there is no may in early May. 

He did not ride at the even pace sensible people use 
who have marked out a journey from one place to an- 
other, and settled what time it will take them. He rode 
at variable speeds, and always as though he was looking 
for something that missing left life attractive still but a 
little wanting in significance. And sometimes he was so 


MR. POLLY TAKES A VACATION 87 

unreasonably happy he had to whistle and sing, and 
sometimes he was incredibly, but not at all painfully, 
sad. His indigestion vanished with air and exercise, and 
it was quite pleasant in the evening to stroll about the 
garden with Johnson and discuss plans for the future. 
Johnson was full of ideas. Moreover, Mr. Polly had 
marked the road that led to Stamton, that rising populous 
suburb; and as his bicycle legs grew strong his wheel 
with a sort of inevitableness carried him towards the row 
of houses in a back street in which his Larkins cousins 
made their home together. 

He was received with great enthusiasm. 

The street was a dingy little street, a cul-de-sac of very 
small houses in a row, each with an almost flattened bow 
window and a blistered brown door with a black knocker. 
He poised his bright new bicycle against the window, 
and knocked and stood waiting, and felt himself in his 
straw hat and black serge suit a very pleasant and pros- 
perous-looking figure. The door was opened by cousin 
Miriam. She was wearing a bluish print dress that 
brought out a kind of sallow warmth in her skin, and 
although it was nearly four o’clock in the afternoon, her 
sleeves were tucked up, as if for some domestic work, 
above the elbows, showing her rather slender but very 
shapely yellowish arms. The loosely pinned bodice con- 
fessed a delicately rounded neck. 

For a moment she regarded him with suspicion and a 
faint hostility, and then recognition dawned in her eyes. 

“ Why ! ” she said, “ it’s cousin Elfrid ! ” 

“ Thought I’d look you up,” he said. 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


“ Fancy ! you coming to see us like this ! ” she an- 
swered. 

They stood confronting one another for a moment, 
while Miriam collected herself for the unexpected emer- 
gency. 

“Explorations menanderings ” said Mr. Polly, indi- 
cating the bicycle. 

Miriam’s face betrayed no appreciation of the remark. 

“ Wait a moment,” she said, coming to a rapid de- 
cision, “ and I’ll tell Ma.” 

She closed the door on him abruptly, leaving him a 
little surprised in the street. “ Ma I ” he heard her call- 
ing, and swift speech followed, the import of which he 
didn’t catch. Then she reappeared. It seemed but an in- 
stant, but she was changed; the arms had vanished into 
sleeves, the apron had gone, a certain pleasing disorder 
of the hair had been at least reproved. 

“ I didn’t mean to shut you out,” she said, coming out 
upon the step. “ I just told Ma. How are you, Elfrid? 
You are looking well. I didn’t know you rode a bicycle. 
Is it a new one ? ” 

She leaned upon his bicycle. “ Bright it is ! ” she said. 
“ What a trouble you must have to keep it clean ! ” 

Mr. Polly was aware of a rustling transit along the 
passage, and of the house suddenly full of hushed but 
strenuous movement. 

“ It’s plated mostly,” said Mr. Polly. 

“ What do you carry in that little bag thing?” she 
asked, and then branched off to : “ We’re all in a mess 
to-day you know. It’s my cleaning up day to-day. I’m 


MR. POLLY TAKES A VACATION 89 

not a bit tidy I know, but I do like to ’ave a go in at 
things now and then. You got to take us as you find us, 
Elfrid. Mercy we wasn’t all out.” She paused. She 
was talking against time. “ I am glad to see you again,” 
she repeated. 

“ Couldn’t keep away,” said Mr. Polly gallantly. “ Had 
to come over and see my pretty cousins again.” 

Miriam did not answer for a moment. She coloured 
deeply. “ You do say things ! ” she said. 

She stared at Mr. Polly, and his unfortunate sense of 
fitness made him nod h'is head towards her, regard her 
firmly with a round brown eye, and add impressively: 
“ I don’t say which of them.” 

Her answering expression made him realise for an in- 
stant the terrible dangers he trifled with. Avidity flared 
up in her eyes. Minnie’s voice came happily to dissolve 
the situation. 

“ ’Elio Elfrid ! ” she said from the doorstep. 

Her hair was just passably tidy, and she was a little 
effaced by a red blouse, but there was no mistaking the 
genuine brightness of her welcome. 

He was to come in to tea, and Mrs. Larkins, exuber- 
antly genial in a floriferous but dingy flannel dressing 
gown, appeared to confirm that. He brought in his bi- 
cycle and put it in the narrow, empty, passage, and every- 
one crowded into a small untidy kitchen, whose table had 
been hastily cleared of the debris of the midday repast. 

“ You must come in ’ere,” said Mrs. Larkins, “ for 
Miriam’s turn-out the front room. I never did see such 
a girl for cleanin’ up. Miriam’s ’oliday’s a scrub. You’ve 


90 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


caught us on the ’Op as the sayin’ is, but Welcome all 
the same. Pity Annie’s at work to-day; she won’t be 
’ome till seven.” 

Miriam put chairs and attended to the fire, Minnie 
edged up to Mr. Polly and said : “ I am glad to see you 
again, Elfrid,” with a warm contiguous intimacy that 
betrayed a broken tooth. Mrs. Larkins got out tea 
things, and descanted on the noble simplicity of their 
lives, and how he “ mustn’t mind our simple ways.” 
They enveloped Mr. Polly with a geniality that intoxi- 
cated his amiable nature; he insisted upon helping lay 
the things, and created enormous laughter by pretending 
not to know where plates and knives and cups ought to 
go. “ Who’m I going to sit next ? ” he said, and devel- 
oped voluminous amusement by attempts to arrange the 
plates so that he could rub elbows with all three. Mrs. 
Larkins had to sit down in the Windsor chair by the 
grandfather clock (which was dark with dirt and not 
going) to laugh at her ease at his well-acted perplexity. 

They got seated at last, and Mr. Polly struck a vein of 
humour in telling them how he learnt to ride the bicycle. 
He found the mere repetition of the word “ wabble ” 
sufficient to produce almost inextinguishable mirth. 

“ No foreseeing little accidentulous misadventures,” he 
said, “ none whatever.” 

(Giggle from Minnie.) 

“ Stout elderly gentleman — shirt sleeves — large straw 
wastepaper basket sort of hat — starts to cross the road — 
going to the oil shop — prodic refreshment of oil can ” 


MR. POLLY TAKES A VACATION 91 

“ Don’t say you run ’im down,” said Mrs. Larkins, 
gasping. “ Don’t say you run ’im down, Elfrid ! ” 

“ Run ’im down ! Not me, Madam. I never run any- 
thing down. Wabble. Ring the bell. Wabble, wab- 
ble—^-” 

(Laughter and tears.) 

“No one’s going to run him down. Hears the bell ! 
Wabble. Gust of wind. Off comes the hat smack into 
the wheel. Wabble. Lord! what's going to happen? 
Hat across the road, old gentleman after it, bell, shriek. 
He ran into me. Didn’t ring his bell, hadn’t got a bell — 
just ran into me. Over I went clinging to his venerable 
head. Down he went with me clinging to him. Oil can 
blump, blump into the road.” 

(Interlude while Minnie is attended to doe crumb in 
the wind pipe.) 

“ Well, what happened to the old man with the oil 
can ? ” said Mrs. Larkins. 

“We sat about among the d ebreece and had a bit of 
an argument. I told him he oughtn’t to come out wear- 
ing such a dangerous hat — flying at things. Said if he 
couldn’t control his hat he ought to leave it at home. 
High old jawbacious argument we had, I tell you. * I 

tell you, sir ’ 4 I tell you , sir.’ Waw-waw-waw. In- 

furiacious. But that’s the sort of thing that’s constantly 
happening you know — on a bicycle. People run into 
you, hens and cats and dogs and things. Everything 
seems to have its mark on you ; everything.” 

“ You never run into anything.” 

“ Never. Swelpme,” said Mr. Polly very solemnly. 


92 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


“ Never, E say ! ” squealed Minnie. “ Hark at ’im ! ” 
and relapsed into a condition that urgently demanded 
back thumping. “ Don’t be so silly,” said Miriam, thump- 
ing hard. 

Mr. Polly had never been such a social success before. 
They hung upon his every word — and laughed. What a 
family they were for laughter! And he loved laughter. 
The background he apprehended dimly ; it was very much 
the sort of background his life had always had. There 
was a threadbare tablecloth on the table, and the slop 
basin and teapot did not go with the cups and saucers, 
the plates were different again, the knives worn down, 
the butter lived in a greenish glass dish of its own. Be- 
hind was a dresser hung with spare and miscellaneous 
crockery, with a workbox and an untidy work-basket, 
there was an ailing must plant 'in the window, and the 
tattered and blotched wallpaper was covered by bright- 
coloured grocers’ almanacs. Feminine wrappings hung 
from pegs upon the door, and the floor was covered with 
a varied collection of fragments of oilcloth. The Wind- 
sor chair he sat in was unstable — $which presently af- 
forded material for humour. “ Steady, old nag,” he 
said ; “ whoa, my friskiacious palfry ! ” 

“ The things he says! You never know what he won’t 
say next ! ” 

III 

“ You ain’t talkin’ of goin’ ! ” cried Mrs. Larkins. 

“ Supper at eight.” 

“ Stay to supper with us, now you ’ave come over,” 


MR. POLLY TAKES A VACATION 93 

said Mrs. Larkins, with corroborating cries from Minnie. 
“ Ave a bit of a walk with the gals, and then come 
back to supper. You might all go and meet Annie while 
I straighten up, and lay things out.” 

“ You’re not to go touching the front room mind,” 
said Miriam. 

“ Who's going to touch yer front room?” said Mrs. 
Larkins, apparently forgetful for a moment of Mr. Polly. 

Both girls dressed with some care while Mrs. Larkins 
sketched the better side of their characters, and then the 
three young people went out to see something of Stamton. 
In the streets their risible mood gave way to a self-con- 
scious propriety that was particularly evident in Miriam’s 
bearing. They took Mr. Polly to the Stamton Wreck- 
ery-ation ground — that at least was what they called it — 
with its handsome custodian’s cottage, its asphalt paths, 
its Jubilee drinking fountain, its clumps of wallflower 
and daffodils, and so to the new cemetery and a distant 
view of the Surrey hills, and round by the gasworks to 
the canal to the factory, that presently disgorged a sur- 
prised and radiant Annie. 

“ EI-/0 ! ” said Annie. 

It is very pleasant to every properly constituted mind 
to be a centre of amiable interest for one’s fellow 
creatures, and when one is a young man conscious of be- 
coming mourning and a certain wit, and the fellow 
creatures are three young and ardent and sufficiently 
expressive young women who dispute for the honour of 
walking by one’s side, one may be excused a secret ex- 
altation. They did dispute. 


94 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


“ I’m going to ’ave ’im now/’ said Annie. “ You 
two’ve been ’aving ’im all the afternoon. Besides, I’ve 
got something to say to him.” 

She had something- to say to him. It came presently. 
“ I say,” she said abruptly. “ I did get them rings out 
of a prize packet.” 

“ What rings ? ” asked Mr. Polly. 

“ What you saw at your poor father’s funeral. You 
made out they meant something. They didn’t — straight.” 

“ Then some people have been very remiss about their 
chances,” said Mr. Polly, understanding. 

“ They haven’t had any chances,” said Annie. “ I 
don’t believe in making oneself too free with people.” 

“ Nor me,” said Mr. Polly. 

“ I may be a bit larky and cheerful in my manner,” 
Annie admitted. “ But it don’t mean anything. I ain’t 
that sort.” 

“ Right O,” said Mr. Polly. 

IV 

It was past ten when Mr. Polly found himself riding 
back towards Easewood in a broad moonlight and with 
a little Japanese lantern dangling from his handle bar 
and making a fiery circle of pinkish light on and round 
about his front wheel. He was mightily pleased with 
himself and the day. There had been four-ale to drink 
at supper mixed with gingerbeer, very free and jolly in a 
jug. No shadow fell upon the agreeable excitement of 
his mind until he faced the anxious and reproachful face 


MR , . POLLY TAKES A VACATION 95 

of Johnson, who had been sitting up for him, smoking 
and trying to read the odd volume of “ Purchas his Pil- 
grimes,” — about the monk who went into Sarmatia and 
saw the Tartar carts. 

“ Not had an accident, Elfrid?” said Johnson. 

The weakness of Mr. Polly’s character came out in 
his reply. “ Not much,” he said. “ Pedal got a bit loose 
in Stamton, O’ man. Couldn’t ride it. So I looked up 
the cousins while I waited.” 

“ Not the Larkins lot?” 

“ Yes.” 

Johnson yawned hugely and asked for and was given 
friendly particulars. “ Well,” he said, “ better get to 
bed. I have been reading that book of yours — rum stuff. 
Can’t make it out quite. Quite out of date I should 
say if you asked me.” 

“ That’s all right, O’ man,” said Mr. Polly. 

“ Not a bit of use for anything I can see.” 

“ Not a bit.” 

“ See any shops in Stamton ? ” 

“ Nothing to speak of,” said Mr. Polly. “ Goo-night, 
O’ man.” 

Before and after this brief conversation his mind ran 
on his cousins very warmly and prettily in the vein of 
high spring. Mr. Polly had been drinking at the poisoned 
fountains of English literature, fountains so unsuited to 
the needs of a decent clerk or shopman, fountains 
charged with the dangerous suggestion that it becomes 
a man of gaiety and spirit to make love, gallantly and 
rather carelessly. It seemed to him that evening to be 


9 6 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

handsome and humorous and practicable to make love to 
all his cousins. It wasn’t that he liked any of them par- 
ticularly, but he liked something about them. He liked 
their youth and feminity, their resolute high spirits and 
their interest in him. 

They laughed at nothing and knew nothing, and Min- 
nie had lost a tooth and Annie screamed and shouted, 
but they were interesting, intensely interesting. 

And Miriam wasn’t so bad as the others. He had 
kissed them all and had been kissed in addition several 
times by Minnie, — “ os coolatory exercises.” 

He buried his nose in his pillow and went to sleep — 
to dream of anything rather than getting on in the world, 
as a sensible young man in his position ought to have 
done. 

V 

And now Mr. Polly began to lead a divided life. With 
the Johnsons he professed to be inclined, but not so con- 
clusively inclined as to be inconvenient, to get a shop for 
himself, to be, to use the phrase he preferred, " looking 
for an opening.” He would ride off in the afternoon 
upon that research, remarking that he was going to “ cast 
a strategetical eye” on'Chertsey or Weybridge. But if 
not all roads, still a great majority of them, led by how- 
ever devious ways to Stamton, and to laughter and in- 
creasing familiarity. Relations developed with Annie 
and Minnie and Miriam. Their various characters were 
increasingly interesting. The laughter became percept- 
ibly less abundant, something of the fizz had gone from 


MR. POLLY TAKES A VACATION 97 

the first opening, still these visits remained wonderfully 
friendly and upholding. Then back he would come to 
grave but evasive discussions with Johnson. 

Johnson was really anxious to get Mr. Polly “ into 
something.” His was a reserved honest character, and 
he would really have preferred to see his lodger doing 
things for himself than receive his money for house- 
keeping. He hated waste, anybody’s waste, much more 
than he desired profit. But Mrs. Johnson was all for 
Mr. Polly’s loitering. She seemed much the more human 
and likeable of the two to Mr. Polly. 

He tried at times to work up enthusiasm for the 
various avenues to well-being his discussion with John- 
son opened. But they remained disheartening prospects. 
He imagined himself wonderfully smartened up, acquir- 
ing style and value in a London shop, but the picture was 
stiff and unconvincing. He tried to rouse himself to 
enthusiasm by the idea of his property increasing by 
leaps and bounds, by twenty pounds a year or so let us 
say each year, in a well-placed little shop, the corner shop 
Johnson favoured. There was a certain picturesque in- 
terest in imagining cut-throat economies, but his heart 
told him there would be little in practising them. 

And then it happened to Mr. Polly that real Romance 
came out of dreamland into life, and intoxicated and 
gladdened him with sweetly beautiful suggestions — and 
left him. She came and left him as that dear lady leaves 
sdTnany of us, alas ! not sparing him one jot or one tittle 
of the hallowness of her retreating aspect. 


98 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

It was all the more to Mr. Polly’s taste that the thing 
should happen as things happen in books. 

In a resolute attempt not to get to Stamton that day 
he had turned due southward from. Easewood towards a 
country where the abundance of bracken jungles, lady’s 
smock stitchwork, bluebells and grassy stretches by the 
wayside under shady trees dos much to compensate the 
lighter type of mind for the absence of promising “ open- 
ings.” He turned aside from the road, wheeled his ma- 
chine along a faintly marked attractive trail through 
bracken until he came to a heap of logs against a high 
old stone wall with a damaged coping and wallflower 
plants already gone to seed. He sat down, balanced the 
straw hat on a convenient lump of wood, lit a cigarette, 
and abandoned himself to agreeable musings ana the 
friendly observation of a cheerful little brown and grey 
bird his stillness presently encouraged to approach him. 
“ This is All Right,” said Mr. Polly softly to the little 
brown and grey bird. “ Business — later.” 

He reflected that he might go on this way for four or 
five years, and then be scarcely worse off than he had 
been in his father’s lifetime. 

“ Vile Business,” said Mr. Polly. 

Then Romance appeared. Or to be exact, Romance 
became audible. 

Romance began as a series of small but increasingly 
vigorous movements on the other side of the wall, then 
as a voice murmuring, then as a falling of little fragments 
on the hither side and as ten pink finger tips, scarcely 
apprehended before Romance became startling and em- 


MR. POLLY TAKES A VACATION 99 

phatically a leg, remained for a time a fine, slender, ac- 
tively struggling limb, brown stockinged and wearing a 

brown toe-worn shoe, and then \ A handsome red- 

haired girl wearing a short dress of blue linen was sit- 
ting astride the wall, panting, considerably disarranged 
by her climbing, and as yet unaware of Mr. Polly. . . . 

His fine instincts made him turn his head away and 
assume an attitude of negligent contemplation, with his 
ears and mind alive to every sound behind him. 

“ Goodness ! ” said a voice with a sharp note of sur- 
prise. 

Mr. Polly was on his feet in an instant. “ Dear me ! 
Can I be of any assistance ? ” he said with deferential gal- 
fantry. 

“ I don’t know,” said the young lady, and regarded 
him calmly with clear blue eyes. 

“ I didn’t know there was anyone here,” she added. 

“Sorry,” said Mr. Polly, “ if I am in trudaceous. I 
didn’t know you didn’t want me to be here.” 

She reflected for a moment on the word. 

“ It isn’t that,” she said, surveying him. 

“ I oughtn’t to get over the wall,” she explained. “ It’s 
out of bounds. At least in term time. But this being 
holidays ” 

Her manner placed the matter before him. 

“ Holidays is different,” said Mr. Polly. 

“ I don’t want to actually break the rules,” she said. 

“ Leave them behind you,” said Mr. Polly with a catch 
of the breath, “ where they are safe ; ” and marvelling 


100 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


at his own wit and daring, and indeed trembling within 
himself, he held out a hand for her. 

She brought another brown leg from the unknown, and 
arranged her skirt with a dexterity altogether feminine. 
“ I think I’ll stay on the wall,” she decided. “ So long 
as some of me’s in bounds ” 

She continued to regard him with eyes that presently 
joined dancing in an irresistible smile of satisfaction. 
Mr. Polly smiled in return. 

“ You bicycle ? ” she said. 

Mr. Polly admitted the fact, and she said she did too. 

“ All my people are in India,” she explained. “ It’s 
beastly rot — I mean it’s frightfully dull being left here 
alone.” 

“ All my people,” said Mr. Polly, “ are in Heaven ! ” 

“ I say!” 

“ Fact ! ” said Mr. Polly. “ Got nobody.” 

“ And that’s why ” she checked her artless com- 

ment on his mourning. “ I say,” she said in a sym- 
pathetic voice, “ I am sorry. I really am. Was it a fire 
or a ship — or something? ” 

Her sympathy was very delightful. He shook his 
head. “ The ordinary table of mortality,” he said. “ First 
one and then another.” 

Behind his outward melancholy delight was dancing 
wildly. “ Are you lonely ? ” asked the girl. 

Mr. Polly nodded. 

“ I was just sitting there in melancholic r ectrospecta- 
tiousness,” he said, indicating the logs, and again a swift 
thoughtfulness swept across her face. 


MR. POLLY TAKES A VACATION ioi 


“ There’s no harm in our talking,” she reflected. 

“ It’s a kindness. Won’t you get down? ” 

She reflected, and surveyed the turf below and the 
scene around and him. 

“ I’ll stay on the wall,” she said. “ If only for bounds’ 
sake.” 

She certainly looked quite adorable on the wall. She 
had a fine neck and pointed chin that was particularly 
admirable from below, and pretty eyes and fine eyebrows 
are never so pretty as when they look down upon one. 
But no calculation of that sort, thank Heaven, was going 
on beneath her ruddy shock of hair. 

VI 

“ Let’s talk,” she said, and for a time they were both 
tongue-tied. 

Mr. Polly’s literary proclivities had taught him that 
under such circumstances a strain of gallantry was de- 
manded. And something in his blood repeated that les- 
son. 

“ You make me feel like one of those old knights,” he 
said. “ Who rode about the country looking for dragons 
and beautiful maidens and chivalresque adventures.” 

“ Oh !” she said. “Why?” 

“ Beautiful maiden,” he said. 

She flushed under her freckles with the quick bright 
flush those pretty red-haired people have. “ Nonsense ! ” 
she said. 


102 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

“ You are. I’m not the first to tell you that. A beau- 
tiful maiden imprisoned in an enchanted school.” 

“ You wouldn’t think it enchanted! ” 

“ And here am I — clad in steel. Well, not exactly, but 
my fiery war horse is anyhow. Ready to absquatulate all 
the dragons and rescue you.” 

She laughed, a jolly laugh that showed delightfully 
gleaming teeth. “ I wish you could see the dragons,” 
she said with great enjoyment. Mr. Polly felt they were 
a sun’s distance from the world of everyday. 

“ Fly with me ! ” he dared. 

She stared for a moment, and then went off into peals 
of laughter. “You are funny!” she said. “Why, I 
haven’t known you five minutes.” 

“ One doesn’t — in this medevial world. My mind is 
made up anyhow.” 

He was proud and pleased with his joke, and quick to 
change his key neatly. “ I wish one could,” he said. 

“ I wonder if people ever did! ” 

“If there were people like you.” 

“We don’t even know each other’s names,” she re- 
marked with a descent to matters of fact. 

“ Yours is the prettiest name in the world.” 

“ How do you know ? ” 

“ It must be — anyhow.” 

“ It is rather pretty you know — it’s Christabel.” 

“ What did I tell you?” 

“ And yours ? ” 

“ Poorer than I deserve. It’s Alfred.” 

“ I can’t call you Alfred.” 


MR. POLLY TAKES A VACATION 103 

“Well, Polly.” 

“ It’s a girl’s name ! ” 

For a moment he was out of tune. “ I wish it was ! ” 
he said, and could have bitten out his tongue at the Lar- 
kins sound of it. 

“ I shan’t forget it,” she remarked consolingly. 

“ I say,” she said in the pause that followed. “ Why 
are you riding about the country on a bicycle ? ” 

“ I’m doing it because I like it.” 

She sought to estimate his social status on her limited 
basis of experience. He stood leaning with one hand 
against the wall, looking up at her and tingling with 
daring thoughts. He was a littleish man, you must re- 
member, but neither mean-looking nor unhandsome in 
those days, sunburnt by his holiday and now warmly 
flushed. He had an inspiration to simple speech that 
no practised trifler with love could have bettered. “ There 
is love at first sight,” he said, and said it sincerely. 

She stared at him with eyes round and big with excite- 
ment. 

“ I think,” she said slowly, and without any signs of 
fear or retreat, “ I ought to get back over the wall.” 

“ It needn’t matter to you,” he said. “ I’m just a no- 
body. But I know you are the best and most beautiful 
thing I’ve ever spoken to.” His breath caught against 
something. “ No harm in telling you that,” he said. 

“ I should have to go back if I thought you were seri- 
ous,” she said after a pause, and they both smiled to- 
gether. 

After that they talked in a fragmentary way for some 


104 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

time. The blue eyes surveyed Mr. Polly with kindly 
curiosity from under a broad, finely modelled brow, much 
as an exceptionally intelligent cat might survey a new 
sort of dog. She meant to find out all about him. She 
asked questions that riddled the honest knight in armour 
below, and probed ever nearer to the hateful secret of 
the shop and his normal servitude. And when he made 
a flourish and mispronounced a word a thoughtful shade 
passed like the shadow of a cloud across her face. 

“ Boom ! ” came the sound of a gong. 

“ Lordy ! ” cried the girl and flashed a pair of brown 
legs at him and was gone. 

Then her pink finger tips reappeared, and the top of 
her red hair. “ Knight ! ” she cried from the other side 
of the wall. “ Knight there ! ” 

“ Lady ! ” he answered. 

“ Come again to-morrow ! ” 

“ And your command. But ” 

“ Yes?” 

“ Just one finger.” 

“ What do you mean ? ” 

“ To kiss.” 

The rustle of retreating footsteps and silence. . . . 

But after he had waited next day for twenty minutes 
she reappeared, a little out of breath with the effort to 
surmount the wall— and head first this time. And it 
seemed to him she was lighter and more daring and al- 
together prettier than the dreams and enchanted mem- 
ories that had filled the interval. 


MR. POLLY TAKES A VACATION 105 


VII 

From first to last their acquaintance lasted ten days, 
but into that time Mr. Polly packed ten years of dreams. 

“ He don’t seem,” said Johnson, “ to take a serious 
interest in anything. That shop at the corner’s bound to 
be snapped up if he don’t look out.” 

The girl and Mr. Polly did not meet on every one of 
those ten days, one was Sunday and she could not come, 
and on the eighth the school reassembled and she made 
vague excuses. All their meetings amounted to this, 
that she sat on the wall, more or less in bounds as she 
expressed it, and let Mr. Polly fall in love with her and 
try to express it below. She sat in a state of irrespon- 
sible exaltation, watching him and at intervals prodding 
a visecting point of encouragement into him — with thatt 
strange passive cruelty which is natural to her sex and 
age. 

And Mr. Polly fell in love, as though the world had 
given way beneath him and he had dropped through into 
another, into a world of luminous clouds and of desolate 
hopeless wilderness of desiring and of wild valleys of un- 
reasonable ecstacies, a world whose infinite miseries were 
finer and in some inexplicable way sweeter than the purest 
gold of the daily life, whose joys — they were indeed but 
the merest remote glimpses of joy — were brighter than 
a dying martyr’s vision of heaven. Her smiling face 
looked down upon him out of heaven, her careless pose 
was the living body of life. It was senseless, it was 


106 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

utterly foolish, but all that was best and richest in Mr. 
Polly’s nature broke like a wave and foamed up at that' 
girl’s feet, and died, and never touched her. And she 
sat on the wall and marvelled at him and was amused, 
and once, suddenly moved and wrung by his pleading, 
she bent down rather shamefacedly and gave him a 
freckled, tennis-blistered little paw to kiss. And she 
looked into his eyes and suddenly felt a perplexity, a 
curious swimming of the mind that made her recoil and 
stiffen, and wonder afterwards and dream. . . . 

And then with some dim instinct of self-protection, she 
went and told her three best friends, great students of 
character all, of this remarkable phenomenon she had 
discovered on the other side of the wall. 

“ Look here,” said Mr. Polly, “ I’m wild for the love 
of you ! I can’t keep up this gesticulations game any 
more! I’m not a Knight. Treat me as a human man. 
You may sit up there smiling, but I’d die in torments to 
have you mine for an hour. I’m nobody and nothing. 
But look here! Will you wait for me for five years? 
You’re just a girl yet, and it wouldn’t be hard.” 

“ Shut up ! ” said Christabel in an aside he did not 
hear, and something he did not see touched her hand. 

“ I’ve always been just dill etenty fating about till now, 
but I could work. I’ve just woke up. Wait till I’ve got a 
chance with the money I’ve got.” 

“ But you haven’t got much money ! ” 

“ I’ve got enough to take a chance with, some sort of 
a chance. I’d find a chance. I’ll do that anyhow. I’ll go 


MR. POLLY TAKES A VACATION 107 

away. I mean what I say — I’ll stop trifling and shirking. 
If I don’t come back it won’t matter. If I do ” 

Her expression had become uneasy. Suddenly she 
bent down towards him. 

“ Don’t ! ” she said in an undertone. 

“ Don’t— what? ” 

“Don’t go on like this! You’re different! Go on be- 
ing the knight who wants to kiss my hand as his — what 
did you call it ? ” The ghost of a smile curved her face. 
“ Gurdrum ! ” 

“ But ! ” 

Then through a pause they both stared at each other, 
listening. 

A muffled tumult on the other side of the wall asserted 
itself. 

“ Shut up Rosie ! ” said a voice. 

“ I tell you I will see ! I can’t half hear. Give me a 
leg up ! ” 

“ You Idiot ! He’ll see you. You’re spoiling every- 
thing.” 

The bottom dropped out of Mr. Polly’s world. He felt 
as people must feel who are going to faint. 

“ You’ve got someone ” he said aghast. 

She found life inexpressible to Mr. Polly. She ad- 
dressed some unseen hearers. “ You filthy little Beasts ! ” 
she cried with a sharp note of agony in her voice, and 
swung herself back over the wall and vanished. There 
was a squeal of pain and fear, and a swift, fierce alterca- 
tion. 

For a couple of seconds he stood agape. 


108 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

Then a wild resolve to confirm his worst sense of what 
was on the other side of the wall made him seize a log, 
put it against the stones, clutch the parapet with inse- 
cure fingers, and lug himself to a momentary balance on 
the wall. 

Romance and his goddess had vanished. 

A red-haired girl with a pigtail was wringing the 
wrist of a schoolfellow who shrieked with pain and cried : 
“ Mercy ! mercy ! Ooo ! Christabel ! ” 

“You idiot!” cried Christabel. “You giggling 
Idiot ! ” 

Two other young ladies made ofif through the beech 
trees from this outburst of savagery. 

Then the grip of Mr. Polly’s fingers gave, and he hit 
his chin against the stones and slipped clumsily to the 
ground again, scraping his cheek against the wall and 
hurting his shin against the log by which he had reached 
the top. Just for a moment he crouched against the wall. 

He swore, staggered to the pile of logs and sat down. 

He remained very still for some time, with his lips 
pressed together. 

“ Fool,” he said at last ; “ you Blithering Fool ! ” and 
began to rub his shin as though he had just discovered its 
bruises. 

Afterwards he found his face was wet with blood — 
which was none the less red stuff from the heart because 
it came from slight abrasions. 


CH1APTER THE SIXTH 


MIRIAM 

I 

I T is an ilogical consequence of one human being’s 
ill-treatment that we should fly mmediately to 
another, but that is the way with us. It seemed 
to Mr. Polly that only a human touch could assuage the 
smart of his humiliation. Moreover it had for some un- 
defined reason to be a feminine touch, and the number 
of women in his world was limited. 

He thought of the Larkins family — the Larkins whom 
he had not been near now for ten long days. Healing 
people they seemed to him now — healing, simple people. 
They had good hearts, and he had neglected them for a 
mirage. If he rode over to them he would be able to talk 
nonsense and laugh and forget the whirl of memories 
and thoughts that was spinning round and round so un- 
endurably in his brain. 

“ Law!” said Mrs. Larkins, “come in! You’re quite 
a stranger, Elfrid ! ” 

“ Been seeing to business,” said the unveracious 
Polly. 

“ None of ’em ain’t at ’home, but Miriam’s just out to 
do a bit of shopping. Won’t let me shop, she won’t, be- 

109 


no 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


cause I’m so keerless. She’s a wonderful manager, that 
girl. Minnie’s got some work at the carpet place. ’Ope 
it won’t make ’er ill again. She’s a loving deliket sort, 
is Minnie. . . . Come into the front parlour. It’s a 
bit untidy, but you got to take us as you find us. Wot 
you been doing to your face ? ” 

“ Bit of a scrase with the bicycle,” said Mr. Polly. 

“ Ow?” 

“ Trying to pass a carriage on the on side, and he drew 
up and ran me against a wall.” 

Mrs. Larkins scrutinized it. “ You ought to ’ave some- 
one look after your scrazes,” she said. “ That’s all red 
and rough. It ought to be cold-creamed. Bring your 
bicycle into the passage and come in.” 

She “ straightened up a bit,” that is to say she increased 
the dislocation of a number of scattered articles, put a 
workbasket on the top of several books, swept two or 
three dogs’ eared numbers of the Lady’s Own Novelist 
from the table into the broken armchair, and proceeded 
to sketch together the tea-thing swith various such inter- 
polations as : “ Law, if I ain’t forgot the butter ! All the 
while she talked of Annie’s good spirits and cleverness 
with her millinery, and of Minnie’s affection and Mir- 
iam’s relative love of order and management. Mr. Polly 
stood by the window uneasily and thought how good and 
sincere was the Larkins tone. It was well to be back 
again. 

“ You’re a long time finding that shop of yours,” said 
Mrs. Larkins. 

“ Don’t do to be precipitous,” said Mr. Polly. 


MIRIAM 


hi 


“ No,” said Mrs. Larkins, “ once you got it you got it. 
Like choosing a ’usband. You better see you got it good. 
I kept Larkins ’esitating two years I did, until I felt sure 
of him. A ’ansom man ’e was as you can see by the 
looks of the girls, but ’ansam is as ’ansam does. You’d 
like a bit of jam to your tea, I expect? I ’ope they’ll 
keep their men waiting when the time comes. I tell them 
if they think of marrying it only shows they don’t know 
when they’re well off. Here’s Miriam ! ” 

Miriam entered with several parcels in a net, and a 
peevish expression. “ Mother,” she said, “ you might 
’ave prevented my going out with the net with the broken 
handle. I’ve been cutting my fingers with the string all 
the way ’ome.” Then she discovered Mr. Polly and 
her face brightened. 

“ Elio, Elfrid ! ” she said. “ Where you been all this 
time?” 

“ Looking round,” said Mr. Polly. 

“ Found a shop? ” 

“ One or two likely ones. But it takes time.” 

“ You’ve got the wrong cups, Mother.” 

She went into the kitchen, disposed of her purchases, 
and returned with the right cups. “ What you done to 
your face, Elfrid?” she asked, and came and scrutinised 
his scratches. “ All rough it is.” 

He repeated his story of the accident, and she was 
sympathetic in a pleasant homely way. 

“ You are quiet to-day,” she said as they sat down to 
tea.’” 

“ Meditations” said Mr. Polly. 


112 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


Quite by accident he touched her hand on the table, 
and she answered his touch. 

“ Why not ? ” thought Mr. Polly, and looking up, 
caught Mrs. Larkins’ eye and flushed guiltily. But Mrs. 
Larkins, with unusual restraint, said nothing. She 
merely made a grimace, enigmatical but in its essence 
friendly. 

Presently Minnie came in with some vague grievance 
against the manager of the carpet making place about 
his method of estimating piece work. Her account was 
redundant, defective and highly technical, but redeemed 
by a certain earnestness. “ Pm never within sixpence of 
what I reckon to be,” she said. “ It’s a bit too ’ot.” 
Then Mr. Polly, feeling that he was being conspicuously 
dull, launched into a description of the shop he was look- 
ing for and the shops he had seen. His mind warmed up 
as he talked. 

“ Found your tongue again,” said Mrs. Larkins. 

He had. He began to embroider the subject and work 
upon it. For the first time it assumed picturesque and 
desirable qualities in his mind. It stimulated him to see 
how readily and willingly they accepted his sketches. 
Bright ideas appeared in his mind from nowhere. He 
was suddenly enthusiastic. 

“ When I get this shop of mine I shall have a cat. 
Must make a home for a cat, you know.” 

“ What, to catch the mice ? ” said Mrs. Larkins. 

“ No — sleep in the window. A venerable signor of a 
cat. Tabby. Cat’s no good if it isn’t tabby. Cat I’m 
going to have, and a canary ! Didn’t think of that before, 


MIRIAM 


ii3 

but a cat and a canary seem to go, you know. Summer 
weather I shall sit at breakfast in the little room behind 
the shop, sun streaming in the window to rights, cat on 
a chair, canary singing and — Mrs. Polly. . . 

“ Elio ! ” said Mrs. Larkins. 

“ Mrs. Polly frying an extra bit of bacon. Bacon 
singing, cat singing, canary singing. Kettle singing. 
Mrs. Polly — * — ” 

“ But who’s Mrs. Polly going to be? ” said Mrs. Lar- 
kins. 

“ Figment of the imagination, ma’am,” said Mr. Polly. 
“ Put in to fill up picture. No face to figure as yet. 
Still, that’s how it will be, I can assure you. I think I 
must have a bit of garden. Johnson’s the man for a 
garden of course,” he said, going off at a tangent, “ but 
I don’t mean a fierce sort of garden. Earnest industry. 
Anxious moments. Fervons digging. Shan’t go in for 
that sort of garden, ma’am. No! Too much back- 
ache for me. My garden will be just a patch of ’stur- 
tiums and sweet pea. Red brick yard, clothes’ line. 
Trellis put up in odd time. Humorous wind vane. 
Creeper up the back of the house.” 

“Virginia creeper?” asked Miriam. 

“ Canary creeper,” said Mr. Polly. 

“ You will ’ave it nice,” said Miriam, desirously. 

“ Rather,” said Mr. Polly. “ Ting-a-ling-a-ling. 

Shop !” 

He straightened himself up and they all laughed. 

“ Smart little shop,” he said. “ Counter. Desk. All 
complete. Umbrella stand. Carpet on the floor. Cat 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


114 

asleep on the counter. Ties and hose on a rail over the 
counter. All right.” 

“ I wonder you don’t set about it right off,” said 
Miriam. 

“ Mean to get it exactly right, M’am,” said Mr. Polly. 

“ Have to have a tomcat,” said Mr. Polly, and paused 
for an expectant moment. “ Wouldn’t do to open shop 
one morning, you know, and find the window full of kit- 
tens. Can’t sell kittens. . . 

When tea was over he was left alone with Minnie for 
a few minutes, and an odd intimation of an incident 
occurred that left Mr. Polly rather scared and shaken. 
A silence fell between them — an uneasy silence. He sat 
with his elbows on the table looking at her. All the way 
from Easewood to Stamton his erratic imagination had 
been running upon neat ways of proposing marriage. I 
don’t know why it should have done, but it had. It 
was a kind of secret exercise that had not had any defi- 
nite aim at the time, but which now recurred to him 
with extraordinary force. Hie couldn’t think of any- 
thing in the world that wasn’t the gambit to a proposal. 
It was almost irresistibly fascinating to think how im- 
mensely a few words from him would excite and revolu- 
tionise Minnie. She was sitting at the table with a work- 
basket among the tea things, mending a glove in order to 
avoid her share of clearing away. 

“ I like cats,” said Minnie after a thoughtful pause. 
“ I’m always saying to mother, ‘ I wish we ’ad a cat.’ 
But we couldn’t ’ave a cat ’ere — not with no yard.” 


MIRIAM 


ii5 

“ Never had a cat myself” said Mr. Polly. “ No! ” 

“ Pm fond of them,” said Minnie. 

“ I like the look of them,” said Mr. Polly. “ Can’t 
exactly call myself fond.” 

“ I expect I shall get one some day. When about you 
get your shop.” 

“ I shall have my shop all right before long,” said 
Mr. Polly. “ Trust me. Canary bird and all.” 

She shook her head. “ I shall get a cat first,” she 
said. “ You never mean anything you say.” 

“ Might get ’em together,” said Mr. Polly, with his 
sense of a neat thing outrunning his discretion. 

“ Why ! ’ow d’you mean ? ” said Minnjie, suddenly 
alert. 

“ Shop and cat thrown in,” said Mr. Polly in spite of 
himself, and his head swam and he broke out into a cold 
sweat as he said it. 

He found her eyes fixed on him with an eager expres- 
sion. “ Mean to say ” she began as if for verifica* 

tion. He sprang to his feet, and turned to the window. 
“ Little dog ! ” he said, and moved doorward hastily. 
“ Eating my bicycle tire, I believe,” he explained. And 
so escaped. 

He saw his bicycle in the hall and cut it dead. 

He heard Mrs. Larkins in the passage behind him as 
he opened the front door. 

He turned to her. “ Thought my bicycle was on fire,” 
he said. “ Outside. Funny fancy ! All right, reely. 
Little dog outside. . . . Miriam ready ? ” 

“ What for?” 


n6 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

“ To go and meet Annie.” 

Mrs. Larkins stared at him. “ You’re stopping for a 
bit of supper.” 

^ If I may,” said Mr. Polly. 

“ You’re a rum un,” said Mrs. Larkins, and called : 
“ Miriam!” 

Minnie appeared at the door of the room looking infi- 
nitely perplexed. “ There ain’t a little dog anywhere, 
Elfrid,” she said. 

Mr. Polly passed his hand over his brow. “ I had a 
most curious sensation. Felt exactly as though something 
was up somewhere. That’s why I said Little Dog. All 
right now.” 

He bent down and pinched his bicycle tire. 

“ You was saying something about a cat, Elfrid,” said 
Minnie. 

“ Give you one,” he answered without looking up. 
u The very day my shop is opened.” 

He straightened himself up and smiled reassuringly. 
“ Trust me,” he said. 

II 

When, after imperceptible manoeuvres by Mrs. Larkins, 
he found himself starting circuitously through the inevita- 
ble recreation ground with Miriam to meet Annie, he 
found himself quite unable to avoid the topic of the 
shop that had now taken such a grip upon him. A sense 
of danger only increased the attraction. Minnie’s per- 
sistent disposition to accompany them had been crushed 
by a novel and violent and urgently expressed desire on 


MIRIAM 


ii 7 

the part of Mrs. Larkins to see her do something in the 
house sometimes. . . . 

“ You really think you’ll open a shop? ” asked Miriam. 

“ I hate cribs,” said Mr. Polly, adopting a moderate 
tone. “ In a shop there’s this drawback and that, but 
one is one’s own master.” 

“ That wasn’t all talk?” 

“ Not a bit of it.” 

“ After all,” he went on, “ a little shop needn’t be so 
bad.” 

“ It’s a ’ome,” said Miriam. 

“ It’s a home.” 

Pause. 

“ There’s no need to keep accounts and that sort of 
thing if there’s no assistant. I daresay I could run a 
shop all right if I wasn’t interfered with.” _ 

“ I should like to see you in your shop,” said Miriam. 
“ I expect you’d keep everything tremendously neat.” 

The conversation flagged. 

“ Let’s sit down on one of those seats over there,” said 
Miriam. “ Where we can see those blue flowers.” 

They did as she suggested, and sat down in a comer 
where a triangular bed of stock and dephinium bright- 
ened the asphalted traceries of the recreation ground. 

“ I wonder what they call those flowers,” she said. 
“ I always like them. They’re handsome.” 

“ Delphicums and larkspurs,” said Mr. Polly. “ They 
used to be in the park at Port Burdock.” 

“ Floriferous corner,” he added approvingly. 

He put an arm over the back of the seat, and assumed 


n8 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

a more comfortable attitude. He glanced at Miriam 
who was sitting in a lax, thoughtful pose with her eyes 
on the flowers. She was wearing her old dress, she had 
not had time to change, and the blue tones of her old 
dress brought out a certain warmth in her skin, and her 
pose exaggerated whatever was feminine in her rather 
lean and insufficient body, and rounded her flat chest 
delusively. A little line of light lay along her profile. 
The afternoon was full of transfiguring sunshine, chil- 
dren were playing noisily in the adjacent sandpit, some 
Judas trees were brightly abloom in the villa gardens 
that bordered the Recreation Ground, and all the place 
was bright with touches of young summer colour. It 
all merged with the effect of Miriam in Mr. Polly’s 
mind. 

Her thoughts found speech. “ One did ought to be 
happy in a shop,” she said with a note of unusual softness 
in her voice. 

It seemed to him that she was right. One did ought 
to be happy in a shop. Folly not to banish dreams that 
made one ache of townless woods and bracken tangles 
and red-haired linen-clad figures sitting in dappled sun- 
shine upon grey and crumbling walls and looking queenly 
down on one with blear blue eyes. Cruel and foolish 
dreams they were, that ended in one’s being laughed at 
and made a mock of. There was no mockery here. 

“ A shop’s such a respectable thing to be,” said Miriam 
thoughtfully. 

“ I could be happy in a shop,” he said. 

His sense of effect made him pause. 


MIRIAM 


119 

“ If I had the right company,” he added. 

She became very still. 

Mr. Polly swerved a little from the conversational ice- 
run upon which he had embarked. 

“ Fm not such a blooming Geezer,” he said, “ as not 
to be able to sell goods a bit. One has to be nosy over 
one’s buying of course. But I shall do all right.” 

He stopped, and felt falling, falling through the ach- 
ing silence that followed. 

“If you get the right company,” said Miriam. 

“ I shall get that all right.” 

“ You don’t mean you’ve got someone ” 

He found himself plunging. 

“ I’ve got someone in my eye, this minute,” he said. 

“ Elf rid ! ” she said, turning on him. “ You don’t 
mean ” 

Well, did he mean? “ I do! ” he said. 

“ Not reely ! ” She clenched her hands to keep still. 

He took the conclusive step. 

“ Well, you and me, Miriam, in a little shop — with a 

cat and a canary .” He tried too late to get back to 

a hypothetical note. “ Just suppose it ! ” 

“ You mean,” said Miriam, “ you’re in love with me, 
Elfrid? ” 

What possible answer can a man give to such a ques- 
tion but “ Yes!” 

Regardless of the public park, the children in the sand- 
pit and everyone, she bent forward and seized his shoul- 
der and kissed him on the lips. Something lit up in Mr. 
Polly at the touch. He put an arm about her and kissed 


120 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


her back, and felt an irrevocable act was sealed. He 
had a curious feeling that it would be very satisfying to 
marry and have a wife — only somehow he wished it 
wasn’t Miriam. Her lips were very pleasant to him, and 
the feel of her in his arm. 

They recoiled a little from each other and sat for a 
moment, flushed and awkwardly silent. His mind was 
altogether incapable of controlling its confusion. 

“ I didn’t dream,” said Miriam, “ you cared . 

Sometimes I thought it was Annie, sometimes Min<- 

• _ » 
me 

“ Always liked you better than them,” said Mr. Polly. 

“ I loved you, Elfrid,” said Miriam, “ since ever we 
met at your poor father’s funeral. Leastways I would 
have done, if I had thought. You didn’t seem to mean 
anything you said.” 

“ I can't believe it ! ” she added. 

“ Nor I,” said Mr. Polly. 

“ You mean to marry me and start that little shop ” 

“ Soon as ever I find it,” said Mr. Polly. 

“ I had no more idea when I came out with you ” 

“ Nor me 1 ” 

“ It’s like a dream.” 

They said no more for a little while. 

“ I got to pinch myself to think it’s real,” said Miriam. 
“ What they’ll do without me at ’ome I can’t imagine. 
When I tell them ” 

For the life of him Mr. Polly could not tell whether 
he was fullest of tender anticipations or regretful panic. 


MIRIAM 


121 


“ Mother’s no good at managing — not a bit. Annie 
don’t care for ’ouse work and Minnie’s got no ’ed for it. 
What they’ll do without me I can’t imagine.” 

“ They’ll have to do without you,” said Mr. Polly, 
sticking to his guns. 

A clock in the town began striking. 

“ Lor’ ! ” said Miriam, “ we shall miss Annie — sitting 
’ere and love-making ! ” 

She rose and made as if to take Mr. Polly’s arm. But 
Mr. Polly felt that their condition must be nakedly ex- 
posed to the ridicule of the world by such a linking, and 
evaded her movement. 

Annie was already in sight before a flood of hesitation 
and terrors assailed Mr. Polly. 

“ Don’t tell anyone yet a bit,” he said. 

“ Only mother,” said Miriam firmly. 

Ill 

Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The 
pettiest little squiggles of black — ‘looked at in the right 
light, and yet consider the blow they can ghe you upon 
the heart. You return from a little careless holiday 
abroad, and turn over the page of a newspaper, and 
against the name of that distant, vague-conceived rail- 
way in mortgages upon which you have embarked the 
bulk of your capital, you see instead of the familiar, per- 
sistent 95-6 (varying at most to 93 ex. div.) this slightly 
richer arrangement of marks: 76J-78J. 

It is like the opening of a pit just under your feet! 


122 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


So, too, Mr. Polly’s happy sense of limitless resources 
was obliterated suddenly by a vision of this tracery: 


“ 298 ” 

instead of the 

“ 350 ” 

he had come to regard as the fixed symbol of his afflu- 
ence. 

It gave him a disagreeable feeling about the dia- 
phragm, akin in a remote degree to the sensation he had 
when the perfidy of the red-haired schoolgirl became 
plain to him. It made his brow moist. 

“ Going down a vortex ! ” he whispered. 

By a characteristic feat of subtraction he decided that 
he must have spent sixty-two pounds. 

“ Funererial baked meats,” he said, recalling possible 
items. 

The happy dream in which he had been living of long 
warm days, of open roads, of limitless unchecked hours, 
of infinite time to look about him, vanished like a thing 
exchanted. He was suddenly back in the hard old eco- 
nomic world, that exacts work, that limits range, that dis- 
courages phrasing and dispels laughter. He saw Wood 
Street and its fearful suspenses yawning beneath his 
feet. 

And also he had promised to marry Miriam, and on 
the whole rather wanted to. 

He was distraught at supper. Afterwards, when Mrs. 
Johnson had gone to bed with a slight headache, he 
opened a conversation with Johnson. 


MIRIAM 


123 


“ It’s about time, O’ man, I saw about doing some- 
thing, he said. “ Riding about and looking at shops, 
all very debonnairious, O’ man, but it’s time I took one 
for keeps.” 

“ What did I tell you ? ” said Johnson. 

“ How do you think that corner shop of yours will 
figure out ? ” Mr. Polly asked. 

“You’re really meaning it?” 

“If it’s a practable proposition, O’ man. Assuming 
it’s practable. What’s your idea of the figures ? ” 

Johnson went to the chiffonier, got out a letter and tore 
off the back sheet. “ Let’s figure it out,” he said with 
solemn satisfaction. “ Let’s see the lowest you could 
do it on.” 

He squared himself to the task, and Mr. Polly sat be- 
side him like a pupil, watching the evolution of the grey, 
distasteful figures that were to dispose of his little hoard. 

“ What running expenses have we got to provide for? ” 
said Johnson, wetting his pencil. “ Let’s have them first. 
Rent? . . ” 

At the end of an hour of hideous speculations, John- 
son decided : “ It’s close. But you’ll have a chance.” 

“ M’m,” said Mr. Polly. “ What more does a brave 
man want ? ” 

“ One thing you can do quite easily. I’ve asked about 
it.” 

“ What’s that, O’ man ? ” said Mr. Polly. 

“ Take the shop without the house above it.” 

“ I suppose I might put my head in to mind it,” said 
Mr. Polly, “ and get a job with my body.” 


124 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


“ Not exactly that. But I thought you’d save a lot 
if you stayed on here — being all alone as you are.” 

“ Never thought of that, O’ man,” said Mr. Polly, 
and reflected silently upon the needlessness of Miriam. 

“ We were talking of eighty pounds for stock,” said 
Johnson. “ Of course seventy-five is five pounds less, 
isn’t it? Not much else we can cut.” 

“ No,” said Mr. Polly. 

“ It’s very interesting, all this,” said Johnson, folding 
up the half sheet of paper and unfolding it. “ I wish 
sometimes I had a business of my own instead of a 
fixed salary. You’ll have to keep books of course.” 

“ One wants to know where one is.” 

“ I should do it all by double entry,” said Johnson. 
“ A little troublesome at first, but far the best in the 
end.” 

“ Lemme see that paper,” said Mr. Polly, and took 
it with the feeling of a man who takes a nauseating medi- 
cine, and scrutinised his cousin’s neat figures with list- 
less eyes. 

“Well,” said Johnson, rising, stretching, bed! Bet- 
ter sleep on it, O’ man.” 

“ Right O,” said Mr. Polly without moving, but in- 
deed he could as well have slept upon a bed of thorns. 

He had a dreadful night. It was like the end of the 
annual holiday, only infinitely worse. It was like a 
newly arrived prisoner’s backward glance at the trees 
and heather through the prison gates. He had to go 
back to harness, and he was as fitted to go in harness as 
the ordinary domestic cat. All night, Fate, with the 


MIRIAM 


125 

quiet complacency, and indeed at times the very face and 
gestures of Johnson, guided him towards that undesired 
establishment at the corner near the station. “ Oh 
Lord!/’ he,' cried, “I’d 1 rather go> back to cribs. I 
should keep my money anyhow.” Fate never winced. 

“ Run away to sea,” whispered Mr. Polly, but he knew 
he wasn’t man enough. 

“ Cut my blooming throat.” 

Some braver strain urged him to think of Miriam, and 
for a little while he lay still. . . . 

“ Well, O’ man? ” said Johnson when Mr. Polly came 
down to breakfast, and Mrs. Johnson looked up brightly. 
Mr. Polly had never felt breakfast so unattractive be- 
fore. 

“ Just a day or so more, O’ man — to turn it over in 
my mind,” he said. 

“You’ll get the place snapped up,” said Johnson. 

There were times in those last few days of coyness 
with his destiny when his engagement seemed the most 
negligible of circumstances, and times — and these hap- 
pened for the most part at nights after Mrs. Johnson 
had indulged everybody in a Welsh rarebit — when it 
assumed so sinister and portentous an appearance as to 
make him think of suicide. And there were times too 
when he very distinctly desired to be married, now that 
the idea had got into his head, at any cost. Also he 
tried to recall all the circumstances of his proposal time 
after time, and never quite succeeded in recalling what 
had brought the thing off. He went over to Stamton 
with a becoming frequency, and kissed all his cousins 


126 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


and Miriam especially a great deal, and found it very 
stirring and refreshing. They all appeared to know ; 
and Minnie was tearful, but resigned. Mrs. Larkins met 
him, and indeed enveloped him, with unwonted warmth, 
and there was a big pot of household jam for tea. And 
he could not make up his mind to sign his name to any- 
thing about the shop, though it crawled nearer and nearer 
to him, though the project had materialised now to the 
extent of a draft agreement with the place for his signa- 
ture indicated in pencil. 

One morning, just after Mr. Johnson had gone to the 
station, Mr. Polly wheeled his bicycle out into the road, 
went up to his bedroom, packed his long white night- 
dress, a comb, and a toothbrush in a manner that was as 
offhand as he could make it, informed Mrs. Johnson, 
who was manifestly curious, that he was “ off for a 
day or two to clear his head,” and fled forthright into 
the road, and mounting turned his wheel towards the 
tropics and the equator and the south coast of England, 
and indeed more particularly to where the little village 
of Fishbourne slumbers and sleeps. 

When he returned four days later, he astonished John- 
son beyond measure by remarking so soon as the shop 
project was reopened: 

“ I’ve took a little contraption at Fishbourne, O’ man, 
that I fancy suits me better.” 

He paused, and then added in a manner, if possible, 
even more offhand: 

“ Oh ! and I’m going to have a bit of a nuptial over at 
Stamton with one of the Larkins cousins.” 


MIRIAM 


12J 


“ Nuptial! ” said Johnson. 

“ Wedding bells, O’ man. Benedictine collapse.” 

On the whole Johnson showed great self-control. “ It’s 
your own affair, O’ man,” he said when things had been 
more clearly explained, “ and I hope you won’t feel 
sorry when it’s too late.” 

But Mrs. Johnson was first of all angrily silent, and 
then reproachful. “ I don’t see what we’ve done to be 
made fools of like this,” she said. “ After all the trou- 
ble we’ve ’ad to make you comfortable and see after 
you. Out late and sitting up and everything. And 
then you go off as sly as sly without a word, and get a 
shop behind our backs as though you thought we meant 
to steal your money. I ’aven’t patience with such deceit- 
fulness, and I didn’t think it of you, Elfrid. And now 
the letting season’s ’arf gone by, and what I shall do with 
that room of yours I’ve no idea. Frank is frank, and 
fair play fair play ; so / was told any’ow when I was a 
girl. Just as long as it suits you to stay ’ere you stay 
’ere, and then it’s off and no thank you whether we like 
it or not. Johnson’s too easy with you. ’E sits there 
and doesn’t say a word, and night after night ’e’s been 
adding and thinkin’ for you, instead of seeing to his 
own affairs •” 

She paused for breath. 

“ Unfortunate amoor,” said Mr. Polly, apologetically 
and indistinctly. “ Didn’t expect it myself.” 


128 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


IV 

Mr. Polly’s marriage followed with a certain inevita- 
bleness. 

He tried to assure himself that he was acting upon 
his own forceful initiative, but at the back of his mind 
was the completest realisation of his powerlessness to 
resist the gigantic social forces he had set in motion. 
He had got to marry under the will of society, even as 
in times past it has been appointed for other sunny souls 
under the will of society that they should be led out by 
serious and unavoidable fellow-creatures and ceremoni- 
ously drowned or burnt or hung. He would have pre- 
ferred infinitely a more observant and less conspicuous 
role, but the choice was no longer open to him. He 
did his best to play his part, and he procured some partic- 
ularly neat check trousers to do it in. The rest of his 
costume, except for some bright yellow gloves, a grey and 
blue mixture tie, and that the broad crape hat-band was 
changed for a livelier piece of silk, were the things he 
had worn at the funeral of his father. So nearly akin 
are human joy and sorrow. 

The Larkins sisters had done wonders with glrey 
sateen. The idea of orange blossom and white veils 
had been abandoned reluctantly on account of the ex- 
pense of cabs. A novelette in which the heroine had 
stood at the altar in “ a modest going-away dress ” had 
materially assisted this decision. Miriam was frankly 
tearful, and so indeed was Annie, but with laughter as 
well to carry it off. Mr. Polly heard Annie say some- 


MIRIAM 


129 


thing vague about never getting a chance because of 
Miriam always sticking about at home like a cat at a 
mouse-hole, that became, as people say, food for thought. 
Mrs. Larkins was from the first flushed, garrulous, and 
wet and smeared by copious weeping; an incredibly 
soaked and crumpled and used-up pocket handkerchief 
never left the clutch of her plump red hand. “ Goo’ 
girls all of them,” she kept on saying in a tremulous 
voice ; “ such-goo-goo-goo-girls ! ” She wetted Mr. Polly 
dreadfully when she kissed him. Her emotion affected 
the buttons down the back of her bodice, and almost the 
last filial duty Miriam did before entering on her new 
life was to close that gaping orifice for the eleventh 
time. Her bonnet was small and ill-balanced, black 
adorned with red roses, and first it got over her right 
eye until Annie told her of it, and then she pushed it 
over her left eye and looked ferocious for a space, and 
after that baptismal kissing of Mr. Polly the delicate 
millinery took fright and climbed right up to the back 
part of her head and hung on there by a pin, and flapped 
piteously at all the larger waves of emotion that filled 
the gathering. Mr. Polly became more and more aware 
of that bonnet as time went on, until he felt for it like 
a thing alive. Towards the end it had yawning fits. 

The company did not include Mrs. Johnson, but 
Johnson came with a manifest surreptitiousness and 
backed against walls and watched Mr. Polly with doubt 
and speculation in his large grey eyes and whistled 
noiselessly and doubtful on the edge of things. He was, 
so to speak, to be best man, sotto voce. A sprinkling 


130 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


of girls in gay hats from Miriam’s place of business ap- 
peared in church, great nudgers all of them, but only 
two came on afterwards to the house. Mrs. Punt 
brought her son with his ever-widening mind, it was his 
first wedding, and a Larkins uncle, a Mr. Voules, a 
licensed vitualler, very kindly drove over in a gig from 
Sommershill with a plumb, wxll-dressed wife to give the 
bride away. One or two total strangers drifted into the 
church and sat down observantly far away. 

This sprinkling of people seemed only to enhance the 
cool brown emptiness of the church, the rows and rows 
of empty pews, disengaged prayer-books and abandoned 
hassocks. It had the effect of a preposterous misfit. 
Johnson consulted with a thin-legged, short-skirted 
verger about the disposition of the party. The officiat- 
ing clergy appeared distantly in the doorway of the ves- 
try, putting on his surplice, and relapsed into a con- 
templative cheek-scratching that was manifestly habitual. 
Before the bride arrived Mr. Polly’s sense of the church 
found an outlet in whispered criticisms of ecclesiastical 
architecture with Johnson. “ Early Norman arches, 
eh ? ” he said, “ or Perpendicular.” 

“ Can’t say,” said Johnson. 

“ T elessated pavements, all right.” 

“ It’s well laid anyhow.” 

“ Can’t say I admire the altar. Scrappy rather with 
those flowers.” 

He coughed behind his hand and cleared his throat. 
At the back of his mind he was speculating whether flight 
at this eleventh hour would be criminal or merely repre- 


MIRIAM 


131 

hensible bad taste. A murmur from the nudgers an- 
nounced the arrival of the bridal party. 

The little procession from a remote door became one 
of the enduring memories of Mr. Polly’s life. The little 
verger had bustled to meet it, and arrange it according 
to tradition and morality. In spite of Mrs. Larkins’ 
“ Don’t take her from me yet ! ” he made Miriam go 
first with Mr. Voules, the bridesmaids followed and 
then himself hopelessly unable to disentagle himself 
from the whispering maternal anguish of Mrs. Larkins. 
Mrs. Voules, a compact, rounded woman with a square, 
expressionless face, imperturbable dignity, and a dress 
of considerable fashion, completed the procession. 

Mr. Polly’s eye fell first upon the bride ; the sight of 
her filled him with a curious stir of emotion. Alarm, 
desire, affection, respect — and a queer element of re- 
luctant dislike all played their part in that complex eddy. 
The grey dress made her a stranger to him, made her 
stiff and commonplace, she was not even the rather droop- 
ing form that had caught his facile sense of beauty when 
he had proposed to her in the Recreation Ground. There 
was something too that did not please him in the angle of 
her hat, it was indeed an ill-conceived hat with large 
aimless rosettes of pink and grey. Then his mind passed 
to Mrs. Larkins and the bonnet that was to gain such a 
hold upon him; it seemed to be flag-signalling as she 
advanced, and to the two eager, unrefined sisters he was 
acquiring. 

A freak of fancy set him wondering where and when 
in the future a beautiful girl with red hair might march 


1 32 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

along some splendid aisle. Never mind! He became 
aware of Mr. Voules. 

He became aware of Mr. Voules as a watchful, blue 
eye of intense forcefulness. It was the eye of a man 
who has got hold of a situation. He was a fat, short, 
red-faced man clad in a tight-fitting tail coat of black 
and white check with a coquettish bow tie under the low- 
est of a number of crisp little red chins. He held the 
bride under his arm with an air of invincible champion- 
ship, and his free arm flourished a grey top hat of an 
equestrian type. Mr. Polly instantly learnt from the 
eye that Mr. Voules knew all about his longing for 
flight. Its azure pupil glowed with disciplined resolu- 
tion. It said : “ I’ve come to give this girl away, and 
give her away I will. I’m here no wand things have to 
go on all right. So don’t think of it any more ” — and Mr. 
Polly didn’t. A faint phantom of a certain “ lilP dog ” 
that had hovered just beneath the threshold of conscious- 
ness vanished into black impossibility. Until the con- 
clusive moment of the service was attained the eye of 
Mr. Voules watched Mr. Polly relentlessly, and then 
instantly he relieved guard, and blew his nose into a 
voluminous and richly patterned handkerchief, and 
sighed and looked round for the approval and sympathy 
of Mrs. Voules, and nodded to her brightly like one who 
has always foretold a successful issue to things. Mr. 
Polly felt then like a marionette that has just dropped 
off its wire. But it was long before that release arrived. 

He became aware of Miriam breathing close to him. 

“ Hullo ! ” he said, and feeling that was clumsy and 


MIRIAM 


133 

would meet the eye’s disapproval : “ Grey dress — suits 
you no end.” 

Miriam’s eyes shone under her hat-brim. 

“ Not reely! ” she whispered. 

“ You’re all right,” he said with the feeling of obser- 
vation and criticism stiffening his lips. He cleared his 
throat. 

The verger’s hand pushed at him from behind. Some- 
one was driving Miriam towards the altar rail and the 
clergyman. “ We’re in for it,” said Mr. Polly to her 
sympathetically. “Where? Here? Right O.” 

He was interested for a moment or so in something in- 
describably habitual in the clergyman’s pose. What a 
lot of weddings he must have seen ! Sick he must be of 
them! 

“ Don’t let your attention wander,” said the eye. 

“Got the ring?” whispered Johnson. 

“ Pawned it yesterday,” answered Mr. Polly, and then 
had a dreadful moment under that pitiless scrutiny while 
he felt in the wrong waistcoat pocket. . . . 

The officiating clergy sighed deeply, began, and mar- 
ried them wearily and without any hitch. 

“ D’b’loved, we gath’d ’ gether sight o’ Gard ’n face this 
con’ gation join ’gather Man, Worn’ Holy Mat’ my which 
is on’bl state stooted by Gard in times man’s inno - 
cency . . . .” 

Mr. Polly’s thoughts wandered wide and far, and once 
again something like a cold hand touched his heart, and 
he saw a sweet face in sunshine under the shadow of 
trees. 


134 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


Someone was nudging him. It was Johnson’s finger 
diverted his eyes to the crucial place in the prayer-book 
to which they had come. 

“ Wiitou lover, cumfer, oner, keeper sickness and 
health . . ” 

“Say 'I will’ ” 

Mr. Polly moistened his lips. “ I will,” he said 
hoarsely. 

Miriam, nearly inaudible, answered some similar de- 
mand. 

Then the clergyman said : “ Who gifs Worn married 
to this man ? ” 

“ Well, Tm doing that,” said Mr. Voules in a refresh- 
ingly full voice and looking round the church. “ You 
see, me and Martha Larkins being cousins — * — ” 

He was silenced by the clergyman’s rapid grip direct- 
ing the exchange of hands. 

“ Pete arf me,” said the clergyman to Mr. Polly. 
“ Take thee Mirum wed wife ” 

“ Take thee Mirum wed’ wife,” said Mr. Polly. 

“ Have hold this day ford.” 

“ Have hold this day ford.” 

“ Betworse, richpoo’ ” 

“ Bet worsh, richpoo’. . . 

Then came Miriam’s turn. 

“ Lego hands,” said the clergyman ; “ got the ring ? 
No! On the book. So! Here! Pete arf me, 4 withis 
ring Ivy wed.’ ” 

“ Wtihis ring Ivy wed <” 

So it went on, blurred and hurried, like the momentary 


MIRIAM 


135 

vision of an utterly beautiful thing seen through the 
smoke of a passing train. . . . 

“ Now, my boy,” said Mr. Voules at last, gripping Mr. 
Polly's elbow tightly, “ you’ve got to sign the registry, 
and there you are ! Done ! ” 

Before him stood Miriam, a little stiffly, the hat with a 
slight rake across her forehead, and a kind of question- 
ing hesitation in her face. Mr. Voules urged him past 
her. 

It was astounding. She was his wife! 

And for some reason Miriam and Mrs. Larkins were 
sobbing, and Annie was looking grave. Hadn’t they 
after all wanted him to marry her? Because if that was 
the case ! 

He became aware for the first time of the presence of 
Uncle Pentstemon in the background, but approaching, 
wearing a tie of a light mineral blue colour, and grinning 
and sucking enigmatically and judiciously round' his 
principal tooth. 

V 

It was in the vestry that the force of Mr. Voules’ 
personality began to show at its true value. He seemed 
to open out and spread over things directly the restraints 
of the ceremony were at an end. 

“ Everything,” he said to the clergyman, “ excellent.” 
He also shook hands with Mrs. Larkins, who clung to 
him for a space, and kissed Miriam on the cheek. “ First 
kiss for me,” he said, “ anyhow.” 

He led Mr. Polly to the register by the arm, and then 


1 36 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

got chairs for Mrs. Larkins and his wife. He then 
turned on Miriam. “ Now, young people,” he said. 
“ One ! or I shall again.” 

“ That’s right ! ” said Mr. Voulefe. “ Same again, 
Miss.” 

Mr. Polly was overcome with modest confusion, and 
turning, found a refuge from this publicity in the arms 
of Mrs. Larkins. Then in a state of profuse moisture 
he was assaulted and kissed by Annie and Minnie, who 
were immediately kissed upon some indistinctly stated 
grounds by Mr Voules, who then kissed the entirely 
impassive Mrs. Voules and smacked his lips and re- 
marked : “ Home again safe and sound ! ” Then with a 
strange harrowing cry Mrs. Larkins seized upon and be- 
dewed Miriam with kisses, Annie and Minnie kissed each 
other, and Johnson went abruptly to the door of the 
vestry and stared into the church — no doubt with ideas 
of sanctuary in his mind. “ Like a bit of a kiss round 
sometimes,” said Mr. Voules, and made a kind of hissing 
noise with his teeth, and suddenly smacked his hands 
together with great eclat several times. Meanwhile the 
clergyman scratched his cheek with one hand and fiddled 
the pen with the other and the verger coughed protest- 
ingly. 

“ The dog cart’s just outside,” said Mr. Voules. “ No 
walking home to-day for the bride, Mam.” 

“ Not going to drive us? ” cried Annie. 

“ The happy pair, Miss. Your turn soon.” 

“ Get out ! ” said Annie. “ I shan’t marry — ever.” 

“ You won’t be able to help it. You’ll have to do it — 


MIRIAM 


13 7 


just to disperse the crowd.” Mr. oVules laid his hand on 
Mr. Polly’s shoulder. “ The bridegroom gives his arm 
to the bride. Hands across and down the middle. 
Prump. Prump, Perump-pump-pump-pump.” 

Mr. Polly found himself and the bride leading the way 
towards the western door. 

Mrs. Larkins passed close to Uncle Pentstemon, sob- 
bing too earnestly to be aware of him. “ Such a goo- 
goo-goo-girl ! ” she sobbed. 

“ Didn’t think I’d come, did you?” said Uncle Pentste- 
mon, but she swept past him, too busy with the expres- 
sion of her feelings to observe him. 

“ She didn’t think I’d come, I lay,” said Uncle Pentste- 
mon, a little foiled, but effecting an auditory lodgment 
upon Johnson. 

“ I don’t know,” said Johnson uncomfortably. “ I 
suppose you were asked. How are you getting on ? ” 

“ I was arst,” said Uncle Pentstemon, and brooded for 
a moment. 

“ I goes about seeing wonders,” he added, and then 
in a sort of enhanced undertone : “ One of ’er girls get- 
tin’ married. That’s what I mean by wonders. Lord’s 
goodness ! Wow ! ” 

“ Nothing the matter? ” asked Johnson. 

“ Got it in the back for a moment. Going to be a 
change of weather I suppose,” said Uncle Pentstemon. 
“ I brought ’er a nice present, too, what I got in this 
passel. Vallyble old tea caddy that uset’ be my mother’s. 
What I kep’ my baccy in for years and years — till the 
hinge at the back got broke. It ain’t been no use to me 


138 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

particular since, so thinks I, drat it ! I may as well give 
it ’er at not. . . 

Mr. Polly found himself emerging from the western 
door. 

Outside, a crowd of half-a-dozen adults and about fifty 
children had collected, and hailed the approach of the 
newly wedded couple with a faint, intederminate cheer. 
All the children were holding something in little bags, 
and his attention was caught by the expression of vin- 
dictive concentration upon the face of a small big-eared 
boy in the foreground. He didn't for the moment realise 
what these things might import. Then he received a 
stinging handful of rice in the ear, and a great light 
shone. 

“ Not yet, you young fool ! ” he heard Mr. Voules say- 
ing behind him, and then a second handful spoke against 
his hat. 

“ Not yet,” said Mr. Voules with increasing emphasis, 
and Mr. Polly became aware that he and Miriam were 
the focus of two crescents of small boys, each with the 
light of massacre in his eyes and a grubby fist clutching 
into a paper bag for rice ; and that Mr. Voules was ward- 
ing off probable discharges with a large red hand. 

The dog cart was in charge of a loafer, and the horse 
and the whip were adorned with white favours, and the 
back seat was confused but not untenable with hampers. 
“ Up we go,” said Mr. Voules, “ old birds in front and 
young ones behind.” An ominous group of ill-restrained 
rice-throwers followed them up as they mounted. 

“ Get your handkerchief for your face,” said Mr. Polly 


MIRIAM 


139 


to his bride, and took the place next the pavement with 
considerable heroism, held on, gripped his hat, shut his 
eyes and prepared for the worst. “ Off ! ” said Mr. 
Voules, and a concentrated fire came stinging Mr. Polly’s 
face. 

The horse shied, and when the bridegroom could look 
at the world again it was manifest the dogcart had just 
missed an electric tram by a hairsbreadth, and far away 
outside the church railings the verger and Johnson were 
battling with an active crowd of small boys for the life 
of the rest of the Larkins family. Mrs. Punt and her 
son had escaped across the road, the son trailing and 
stumbling at the end of a remorseless arm, but Uncle 
Pentstemon, encumbered by the tea-caddy, was the cen- 
tre of a little circle of his own, and appeared to be drat- 
ting them all very heartily. Remoter, a policeman ap- 
proached with an air of tranquil unconsciousness. 

“ Steady, you idiot. Stead-y ! ” cried Mr. Voules, and 
then over his shoulder : “ I brought that rice ! I like 

old customs! Whoa! Stead-y.” 

The dogcort swerved violently, and then, evoking a 
shout of groundless alarm from a cyclist, took a corner, 
and the rest of the wedding party was hidden from Mr. 
Polly’s eyes. 

VI 

“ We’ll get the stuff into the house before the old gal 
comes along,” said Mr. Voules, “ if you’ll hold the hoss.” 

“ How about the key ? ” asked Mr. Polly. 

“ I got the key, coming.” 


140 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


And while Mr. Polly held the sweating horse and 
dodged the foam that dripped from its bit, the house ab- 
sorbed Miriam and Mr. Voules altogether. Mr. Voules 
carried in the various hampers he had brought with him, 
and finally closed the door behind him. 

For some time Mr. Polly remained alone with his 
charge in the little blind alley outside the Larkins’ house, 
while the neighbours scrutinised him from behind their 
blinds. He reflected that he was a married man, that he 
must look very like a fool, that the head of a horse is a 
silly shape and its eye a bulger; he wondered what the 
horse thought of him, and whether it really liked being 
held and patted on the neck or whether it only submitted 
out of contempt. Did it know he was married? Then 
he wondered if the clergyman had thought him much of 
an ass, and then whether the individual lurking behind 
the lace curtains of the front room next door was a man 
or a woman. A door opened over the way, and an elderly 
gentleman in a kind of embroidered fez appeared smok- 
ing a pipe with a quiet satisfied expression. He regarded 
Mr. Polly for some time with mild but sustained curiosity. 
Finally he called: “Hi!” 

“ Hullo ! ” said Mr. Polly. 

“ You needn’t ’old that ’orse,” said the old gentleman. 

“ Spirited beast,” said Mr. Polly. “ And,” — with some 
faint analogy to ginger beer in his mind — “ he’s up to- 
day.” 

“ ’E won’t turn ’isself round,” said the old gentleman, 
“ anyow. And there ain’t no way through for ’im to go.” 

“Verbum sap,” said Mr. Polly, and abandoned the 


MIRIAM 


141 

horse and turned to the door. It opened to him just as 
Mrs. Larkins on the arm of Johnson, followed by Annie, 
Minnie, two friends, Mrs. Punt and her son and at a 
slight distance Uncle Pentstemon, appeared round the 
corner. 

“ They’re coming,” he said to Miriam, and put an arm 
about her and gave her a kiss. 

She was kissing him back when they were startled 
violently by the shying of two empty hampers into the 
passage. Then Mr. Voules appeared holding a third. 

“ Here ! you’ll ’ave plenty of time for that presently,” 
he said, “ get these hampers away before the old girl 
comes. I got a cold collation here to make her sit up. 
My eye ! ” 

Miriam took the hampers, and Mr. Polly under com- 
pulsion from Mr. Voules went into the little front room. 
A profuse pie and a large ham had been added to the 
modest provision of Mrs. Larkins, and a number of 
select looking bottles shouldered the bottle of sherry and 
the bottle of port she had got to grace the feast. They 
certainly went better with the iced wedding cake in the 
middle. Mrs. Voules, still impassive, stood by the win- 
dow regarding these things with a faint approval. 

“Makes it look a bit thicker, eh?” said Mr. Voules, 
and blew out both his cheeks and smacked his hands to- 
gether violently several times. “ Surprise the old girl no 
end.” 

He stood back and smiled and bowed with arms ex- 
tended as the others came clustering at the door. 


142 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


“ Why, Un-cle Voules ! ” cried Annie, with a rising 
note. 

It was his reward. 

And then came a great wedging and squeezing and 
crowding into the little room. Nearly everyone was 
hungry, and eyes brightened at the sight of the pie and 
the ham and the convivial array of bottles. “ Sit down 
everyone,” cried Mr. Voules, “ leaning against anything 
counts as sitting, and makes it easier to shake down the 
grub ! ” 

The two friends from Miriam’s place of business came 
into the room among the first, and then wedged them- 
selves so hopelessly against Johnson in an attempt to get 
out again and take off their things upstairs that they 
abandoned the attempt. Amid the struggle Mr. Polly 
saw Uncle Pentstemon relieve himself of his parcel by 
giving it to the bride. “ Here ! ” he said and handed it 
to her. “ Weddin’ present,” he explained, and added 
with a confidential chuckle, “ I never thought I’d ’ave to 
give you one — ever.” 

“ Who says steak and kidney pie? ” bawled Mr. Voules. 
“ Who says steak and kidney pie? You ’ave a drop of 
old Tommy, Martha. That’s what you want to steady 

you. . . . 

“ Sit down everyone and don’t all speak at once. Who 
says steak and kidney pie ? . . .” 

“ Vocificeratious,” whispered Mr. Polly. “Convivial 
vocWcerations.” 

“ Bit of ’am with it,” shouted Mr. Voules, poising a 
slice of ham on his knife. “ Anyone ’ave a bit of ’am 


MIRIAM 


143 

with it? Won’t that little man of yours, Mrs. Punt — 
won’t ’e ’ave a bit of ’am? . . 

“ And no wladies and gentlemen,” said Mr. Voules, 
still standing and dominating the crammed roomful, 
“ now you got your plates filled and something I can war- 
rant you good in your glasses, wot about drinking the 
’ealth of the bride? ” 

“ Eat a bit fust,” said Uncle Petstemon, speaking with 
his mouth full, amidst murmurs of applause. “ Eat a bit 
fust.” 

So they did, and the plates clattered and the glasses 
chinked. 

Mr. Polly stood shoulder to shoulder with Johnson for 
a moment. “ In for it,” said Mr. Polly cheeringly. 
“ Cheer up O’ man and peck a bit. No reason why you 
shouldn’t eat, you know.” 

The Punt boy stood on Mr. Polly’s boots for a minute, 
struggling violently against the compunction of Mrs. 
Punt’s grip. 

“ Pie,” said the Punt boy, “ Pie ! ” 

“ You sit ’ere and ’ave ’am, my lord ! ” said Mrs. Punt, 
prevailing. “ Pie you can’t ’ave and you won’t.” 

“ Lor bless my heart, Mrs. Punt ! ” protested Mr. 
Voules, “ let the boy ’ave a bit if he wants it — wedding 
and all ! ” 

“ You ’aven’t ’ad ’im ’sick ’on ’your ’ands, Uncle 
Voules,” said Mrs. Punt. “ Else you wouldn’t want to 
humour his fancies as you do. . . .” 

“ I can’t help feeling it’s a mistake, O’ man,” said 


144 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


Johnson, in a confidential undertone. “ I can’t help feel- 
ing you’ve been Rash. Let’s hope for the best.” 

“ Always glad of good wishes, O’ man,” said Mr. 
Polly. “ You’d better have a drink of something. Any- 
how, sit down to it.” 

Johnson sibsided gloomily, and Mr. Polly secured 
some ham and carried it off and sat himself down on the 
sewing machine on the floor in the corner to devour it. 
He was hungry, and a little cut off from the rest of the 
company by Mrs. Voules’ hat and back, and he occupied 
himself for a time with ham and his own thoughts. He 
became aware of a series of jangling concussions on the 
table. He craned his neck and discovered that Mr. 
Voules was standing up and leaning forward over the 
table in the manner distinctive of after-dinner speeches, 
tappig upon the table with a black bottle. “ Ladies and 
gentlemen,” said Mr. Voules, raising his glass solemnly 
in the empty desert of sound he had made, and paused for 
a second or so. “ Ladies and gentlemen, — The Bride.” 
He searched his mind for some suitable wreath of speech, 
and brightened at last with discovery. “ Here’s Luck 
to her ! ” he said at last. 

“ Here’s Luck ! ” said Johnson hopelessly but reso- 
lutely, and raised his glass. Everybody murmured: 
“ Here’s luck.” 

“ Luck ! ” said Mr. Polly unseen in his corner, lifting a 
forkful of ham. 

“ That’s all right,” said Mr. Voules with a sigh of re- 
lief at having brought off a difficult operation. “ And 
now, who’s for a bit more pie?” 


MIRIAM 


145 


For a time conversation was fragmentary again. But 
presently Mr. Voules rose from his chair again ; he had 
subsided with a contented smile after his first oratorical 
effort, and produced a silence by renwed hammering. 
“ Ladies and gents,” he said, “ fill up for the second 
toast : — the happy Bridegroom ! ” H'e stood for half a 
minute searching his mind for the apt phrase that came 
at last in a rush. “ Here’s (hie) luck to him” said Mr. 
Voules. 

“ Luck to him ! ” said everyone, and Mr. Polly, stand- 
ing up behind Mrs. Voules, bowed amiably, amidst en- 
thusiasm. 

“ He may say what he likes,” said Mrs. Larkins, “ he’s 
got luck. That girl’s a treasure of treasures, and always 
has been ever since she tried to nurse her own little sister, 
being but three at the time, and fell the full flights of 
stairs from top to bottom, no hurt that any outward eye 
’s even seen, but always ready and helpful, always tidying 
and busy. A treasure I must say and a treasure I will 
say, giving no more than her due. . . .” 

She was silenced altogether by a rapping sound that 
would not be denied. Mr. Voules had been struck by a 
fresh idea and was standing up and hammering with the 
bottle again. 

“ The third Toast, ladies and gentlemen,” he said ; “ fill 
up, please. The Mother of the bride. I — er. . . . 

Uoo. . . . Ere ! . . . Ladies and gem, ’Ere’s 

Luck to ’er! . . .” 


i 4 ft THE HISTORY OF MR . POLLY 


VII 

The dingy little room was stuffy and crowded to its 
utmost limit, and Mr. Polly’s skies were dark with the 
sense of irreparable acts. Everybody seemed noisy and 
greedy and doing foolish things. Miriam, still in that 
unbecoming hat — for presently they had to start off to 
the station together — sat just beyond Mrs. Punt and her 
son, doing her share in the hospitalities, and ever and 
again glancing at him with a deliberately encouraging 
smile. Once she leant over the back of the chair to him 
and whispered cheeringly : “ Soon be together now.” 

Next to her sat Johnson, profoundly silent, and then 
Annie, talking vigorously to a friend. Uncle Pentstemon 
was eating voraciously opposite, but with a kindling eye 
for Annie. Mrs. Larkins sat next to Mr. Voules. She 
was unable to eat a mouthful, she declared, it would 
choke her, but ever and again Mr. Voules wooed her to 
swallow a little drop of liquid refreshment. 

There seemed a lot of rice upon everybody, in their 
hats and hair and the folds of their garments. 

Presently Mr. Voules was hammering the table for the 
fourth time in the interests of the Best Man. . . . 

All feasts come to an end at last, and the break-up of 
things was precipitated by alarming symptoms on the 
part of Master Punt. He was taken out hastily after a 
whispered consultation, and since he had got into the 
corner between the firtplace and tht cupboard, that meant 
everyone moving to make way for him. Johnson took 


MIRIAM 


147 

the opportunity to say, “ Well — so long,” to anyone who 
might be listening, and disappear. Mr. Polly found him- 
self smoking a cigarette and walking up and down out- 
side in the company of Uncle Pentstemon, while Mr. 
Voules replaced bottles in hampers and prepared for de- 
parture, and the womenkind of the party crowded up- 
stairs with the bride. Mr. Polly felt taciturn, but the 
events of the day had stirred the mind of Uncle Pentste- 
mon to speech. And so he spoke, discursively and dis- 
connectedly, a little heedless of his listener as wise old 
men will. 

“ They do say,” said Uncle Pentstemon, “ one funeral 
makes many. This time it's a wedding. But it’s all very 
much of a muchness,” said Uncle Pentstemon. . . . 

“ ’Am do get in my teeth nowadays,” said Uncle Pents- 
temon, “ I can’t understand it. ’Tisn’t like there was 
nubbicks or strings or such in ’am. It’s a plain food. 

“ That’s better,” he said at last. 

“ You got to get married,” said Uncle Pentstemon. 
“ Some has. Some hain’t. I done it long before I was 
your age. It hain’t for me to blame you. You can’t ’elp 
being the marrying sort any more than me. It’s nat’ral 
— like poaching or drinking or wind on the stummik. 
You can’t ’elp it and there you are ! As for the good of 
it, there ain’t no particular good in it as I can see. It’s 
a toss up. The hotter come, the sooner cold, but they all 
gets tired of it sooner or later. ... I hain’t no 
grounds to complain. Two I’ve ’ad and berried, and 
might ’ave ’ad a third, and never no worrit with kids — 
never. . . 


148 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

77 You done well not to ’ve tha big gal. I will say 
that for ye. She’s a gad-about grinny, she is, if ever 
was. A gad-about grinny. Mucked up my mushroom 
bed to rights, she did, and I ’aven’t forgot it. Got the 
feet o fa centipede, she ’as — all cjver everything and 
neither with your leave nor by your leave. Like a stray 
’en in a pea patch. Cluck! cluck! Trying to laugh it 
off. / laughed ’er off, I did. Dratted lumpin bag- 
gage ! . . .” 

For while he mused malevolently upon Annie, and 
routed out a reluctant crumb from some coy sitting-out 
place in his tooth. 

“ Wimmin’s a toss up,” said Uncle Pentstemon. 
“ Prize packets they are, and you can’t tell what’s in ’em 
till you took ’em ’ome and undone ’em. Never was a 
batchelor married yet that didn’t buy a pig in a poke. 
Never. Marriage seems to change the very natures in 
’em through and through. You can’t tell what they 
won’t turn into — nohow. 

“ I seen the nicest girls go wrong,” sain Uncle Pentste- 
mon, and added with unusual thoughtfulness, “ Not that 
I mean you got one of that sort.” 

He sent another crumb on to its long home with a 
sucking, encouraging noise. 

“The wust sort’s the grizzler,” Uncle Pentstemon re- 
sumed. “ If ever I’d ’ad a grizzler I’d up and ’it ’er on 
the ’ed with sumpthin’ pretty quick. I don’t think I 
could abide a grizzler,” said Uncle Pentstemon. “ I’d 
liefer ’ave a lump-about like that other gal. I would in- 
deed. I lay I’d make ’er stop laughing after a bit for all 


MIRIAM 


149 

’er airs. And mind where her clumsy great feet 
went. . . . 

“A man’ got to tackle ’em, whatever they be,” said 
Uncle Pentstemon, summing up the shrewd observation 
of an old-world life time. “ Good or bad,” said Uncle 
Pentstemon raising his voice fearlessly, “ a man’s got to 
tackle ’em.” 


VIII 

At last it was time for the two young people to catch 
the train for Waterloo en route for Fishbourne. They 
had to hurry, and as a concluding glory of matrimony 
they travelled second-class, and were seen off by all the 
rest of the party except the Punts, Master Punt being 
now beyond any question unwell. 

“ Off ! ” The train moved out of the station. 

Mr. Polly remained waving his hat and Mrs. Polly 
her handkerchief until they were hidden under the bridge. 
The dominating figure to the last was Mr. Voules. He 
had followed them along the platform waving the eques- 
trian grey hat and kissing his hat to the bride. 

They subsided into their seats. 

“ Got a compartment to ourselves anyhow,” said Mrs. 
Polly after a pause. 

Silence for a moment. 

“ The rice ’e must ’ave bought. Pounds and pounds ! ” 

Mr. Polly felt round his collar at the thought. 

“ Ain’t you going to kiss me, Elfrid, now we’se alone 
together ? ” 

He roused himself to sit forward hands on knees, 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


150 

cocked his hat over one eye, and assumed an expression 
avidity becoming to the occasion. 

“ Never ! ” he said. “ Ever ! ” and feigned to be select- 
ing a place to kiss with great discrimination. 

“ Come here,” he said, and drew her to him. 

“ Be careful of my ’at,” said Mrs. Polly, yielding awk- 
wardly. 


1 


CHAPTER THE SEVENTH 


THE LITTLE SHOP AT FISHBOURNE 

I 

F OR fifteen years Mr. Polly was a respectable shop- 
keeper in Fishbourne. 

Years they were in which every day was tedious, 
and when they were gone it was as if they had gone in a 
flash. But now Mr. Polly had good looks no more, he 
was as I have described him in the beginning of this 
story, thirty-seven and fattish in a not very healthy way, 
dull and yellowish about the complexion, and with dis- 
contented wrinklings round his eyes. He sat on the stile 
above Fishbourne and cried to the Heavens above him: 
“ Oh ! Roo-o-o-ten Be-e-e-astly Silly Hole !” And he 
wore a rather shabby black morning coat and vest, and 
his tie was richly splendid, being from stock, and his golf 
cap aslant over one eye. 

Fifteen years ago, and it might have seemed to you 
that the queer little flower of Mr. Polly’s imagination 
must be altogether withered and dead, and with no living 
seed left in any part of him. But indeed it still lived as 
an insatiable hunger for bright and delightful experi- 
ences, for the gracious aspects of things, for beauty. He 
still read books when he had a chance, books that told of 
151 


152 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


glorious places abroad and glorious times, that wrung a 
rich humour from life and contained the delight of words 
freshly and expressively grouped. But alas ! there are 
not many such books, and for the newspapers and the 
cheap fiction that abounded more and more in the world 
Mr. Polly had little taste. There was no epithet in them. 
And there was no one to talk to, as he loved to talk. And 
he had to mind his shop. 

It was a reluctant little shop from the beginning. 

He had taken it to escape the doom of Johnson’s choice 
and because Fishbourne had a hold upon his imagination. 
He had disregarded the ill-built cramped rooms behind 
it in which he would have to lurk and live, the relentless 
limitations of its dimensions, the inconvenience of an 
underground kitchen that must necessarily be the living- 
room in winter, the narrow yard behind giving upon the 
yard of the Royal Fishbourne Hotel, the tiresome sitting 
and waiting for custom, the restricted prospects of trade. 
He had visualised himself and Miriam first as at break- 
fast on a clear bright winter morning amidst a tremend- 
ous smell of bacon, and then as having muffins for tea. 
He had also thought of sitting on the beach on Sunday 
afternoons and of going for a walk in the country behind 
the town and picking marguerites and poppies. But, in 
fact, Miriam and he were extremely cross at breakfast, 
and it did run to muffins at tea. And she didn’t think 
it looked well, she said, to go trapesing about the country 
on Sundays. 

It was unfortunate that Miriam never took to the 
house from the first. She did not like it when she saw 


MAKING AN END TO THINGS 


153 


it, and liked it less as she explored it. “ There’s too 
many stairs,” she said, “ and the coal being indoors will 
make a lot of work.” 

“ Didn’t think of that,” said Mr. Polly, following her 
round. 

“ It’ll be a hard house to keep clean,” said Miriam. 

“ White paint’s all very well in its way,” said Miriam, 
“ but it shows the dirt something fearful. Better ’ave ’ad 
it nicely grained.” 

* There’s a kind of place here,” said Mr. Polly, 
“ where we might have some flowers in pots.” 

“ Not me,” said Mariam. “ I’ve ’ad trouble enough 
with Minnie and ’er musk. . . .” 

They stayed for a week in a cheap boarding house be- 
fore they moved in. They had bought some furniture 
in Stamton, mpstly second-hand, but with new cheap 
cutlery and china and linen, and they had supplemented 
this from the Fishbourne shops. Miriam, relieved from 
the hilarious associations of home, developed a meagre 
and serious quality of her own, and went about with 
knitted brows pursuing some ideal of “ ’aving everything 
right.” Mr. Polly gave himself to the arrangement of 
the shop with a certain zest, and whistled a good deal 
until Mariam appeared and said that it went through her 
head. So soon as he had taken the shop he had filled the 
window with aggressive posters announcing in no meas- 
ured terms that he was going to open, and now he was 
getting his stuff put out he was resolved to show Fish- 
bourne what window dressing could do. He meant to 
give them boater straws, imitation Panamas, bathing 


154 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

dresses with novelties in stripes, light flannel shirts, sum- 
mer ties, and ready-made flannel trousers for men, youths 
and boys. Incidentally he watched the small fishmonger 
over the way, and had a glimpse of the china dealer next 
door, and wondered if a friendly nod would be out of 
place. And on the first Sunday in this new life he and 
Miriam arrayed themselves with great care, he in his 
wedding-funeral hat and coat and she in her going-away 
dress, and went processionally to church, a more respect- 
able looking couple you could hardly imagine, and looked 
about them. 

Things began to settle down next week into their 
places. A few customers came, chiefly for bathing suits 
and hat guards, and on Saturday night the cheapest 
straw hats and ties, and Mr. Polly found himself more 
and more drawn towards the shop door and the social 
charm of the street. He found the china dealer un- 
packing a crate at the edge of the pavement, and re- 
marked that it was a fine day. The china dealer gave a 
reluctant assent, and plunged into the crate in a manner 
that presented no encouragement to a loquacious neigh- 
bour. 

“ Zealacious commerciality,” whispered Mr. Polly to 
that unfriendly back view. . . . 


II 

Miriam combined earnestness of spirit with great prac- 
tical incapacity. The house was never clean nor tidy, 
but always being frightfully disarranged for cleaning or 


MAKING AN END TO THINGS 


*55 

tidying up, and she cooked because food had to be cooked 
and with a sound moralist’s entire duisregard of the qual- 
ity of the consequences. The food came from her hands 
done rather than improved, and looking as uncomfortable 
as savages clothed under duress by a missionary with a 
stock of cut-sizes. Such food is too apt to behave re- 
sentfully, rebel and work Obi. She ceased to listen to 
her husband’s talk from the day she married him, and 
ceased to unwrinkle the kink in her brow at his presence, 
giving herself up to mental states that had a quality of 
secret preoccupation. And she developed an idea for 
which perhaps there was legitimate excuse, that he was 
lazy. He seemed to stand about in the shop a great deal, 
to read — an indolent habit — and presently to seek com- 
pany for talking. He began to attend the bar parlour of 
the God’s Providence Inn with some frequency, and 
would have done so regularly in the evening if cards, 
which bored him to death, had not arrested conversation. 
But the perpetual foolish variation of the permutations 
and combinations of two and fifty cards taken five at a 
time, and the meagre surprises and excitements that en- 
sue had no chafrms for Mr. Polly’s mind, which was at 
once too vivid in its impressions and too easily fatigued. 

It was soon manifest the shop paid only in the least 
exacting sense, and Miriam did not conceal her opinion 
that he ought to bestir himself and “ do things,” though 
what he was to do was hard to say. You see, when you 
have once sunken your capital in a shop you do not very 
easily get it out again. If customers will not come to you 
cheerfully and freely the law sets limits upon the com- 


156 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

pulsion you may exercise. You cannot pursue people 
about the streets of a watering place, compelling them 
either by threats or importunity to buy flannel trousers. 
Additional sources of income for a tradesman are not 
always easy to find. Wintershed at the bicycle and 
gramaphone shop to the right, played the organ in the 
church, and Clamp of the toy shop was pew opener and 
so forth, Gambell, the greengrocer, waited at table and 
his wife cooked, and Carter, the watchmaker, left things 
to his wife while he went about the world winding 
clocks, but Mr. Polly had none of these arts, and wouldn’t, 
in spite of Miriam’s quietly persistent protests, get any 
other. And on summer evenings he would ride his bi- 
cycle about the country, and if he discovered a sale where 
there were books he would as often as not waste half the 
next day in going again to acquire a job lot of them hap- 
hazard, and bring them home tied about with a string, 
and hide them from Miriam under the counter in the 
shop. That is a heartbreaking thing for any wife with a 
serious investigatory turn of mind to discover. She was 
always thinking of burning these finds, but her natural 
turn for economy prevailed with her. 

The books he read during those fifteen years ! He 
read everything he got except theology, and as he read 
his little unsuccessful circumstances vanished and the 
wonder of life returned to him, the routine of reluctant 
getting up, opening shop, pretending to dust it with zest, 
breakfasting with a shop egg underdone or overdone or 
a herring raw or charred, and coffee made Miriam’s way 
and full of little particles, the return to the shop, the 


MAKING AN END TO THINGS 


1 57 

morning paper, the standing, standing at the door saying 
“ How do ! ” to passers by, or getting a bit of gossip or 
watching unusual visitor’s, all these things vanished as 
the auditorium of a theatre vanishes when the stage is 
lit. He acquired hundreds of books at last, old dusty 
books, books with torn covers and broken covers, fat 
books whose backs were naked string and glue, an inimi- 
cal litter to Miriam. 

There was for example the voyages of La Perouse, 
with many careful, explicit woodcuts and the frankest 
revelations of the ways of the eighteenth century sailor- 
man, homely, adventurous, drunken, incontinent and de- 
lightful, until he floated, smooth and slow, with all sails 
set and mirrowed in the glassy water, until his head was 
full of the thought of shining kindly brown-skinned 
women, who smiled at him and wreathed his head with 
unfamiliar flowers. He had, too, a piece of a book about 
the lost palaces of Yucatan, those vast terraces buried in 
primordial forest, of whose makers there is now no hu- 
man memory. With La Perouse he linked “ The Island 
Nights Entertainments,” and it never palled upon him 
that in the dusky stabbing of the “ Island of Voices ” 
something poured over the stabber’s hands “ like warm 
tea.” Queer incommunicable joy it is, the joy of the vivid 
phrase that turns the statement of the horridest fact to 
beauty ! 

And another book which had no beginning for him was 
the second volume of the Travels of the Abbes Hue and 
Gabet. He followed those two sweet souls from their 
lessons in Thibetan under Sandura the Bearded (who 


158 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

called them donkeys to their infinite benefit and stole 
their store of butter) through a hundred misadventures 
to the very heart of Lhassa, and it was a thirst in him 
that was never quenched to find the other volume and 
whence they came, and who in fact they were. He read 
Fenimore Cooper and “ Tom Cringle’s Log ” side by 
side with Joseph Conrad, and dreamt of the many-hued 
humanity of the East and West Indies until his heart 
ached to see those sun soaked lands before he died. Con- 
rad’s prose had a pleasure for him that he was never able 
to define, a peculiar deep coloured effect. He found too 
one day among a pile of soiled sixpenny books at Port 
Burdock, to which place he sometimes rode on his age- 
ing bicycle, Bart Kennedy’s “ A Sailor Tramp,” all writ- 
ten in livid jerks and had forever after a kindlier and 
more understanding eye for every burly rough who 
slouched through Fishboume High Street. Sterne he 
read with a wavering appreciation and some perplexity, 
but except for the Pickwick papers, for some reason that 
I do not understand he never took at all kindly to 
Dickens. Yet he liked Lever and Thackeray’s “ Cath- 
erine,” and all Dumas until he got to the Vicomte de 
Bragelonne. I am puzzled by his insensibility to Dickens, 
and I record it as a good ristorian should, with an admis- 
sion of my perplexity. It is much more understandable 
that he had no love for Scott. And I suppose it was be- 
cause of his ignorance of the proper pronunciation of 
words that he infinitely preferred any prose to any 
metrical writing. 

A book he browsed over with a recurrent pleasure was 


MAKING AN END TO THINGS 


159 

Waterton’s Wanderings in South America. He would 
even amuse himself by inventing descriptions of other 
birds in the Watertonian manner, new birds that he in- 
vented, birds with peculiarities that made him chuckle 
when they occurred to him. He tried to make Rusper, 
the ironmonger, share this joy with him. He read Bates, 
too, about the Amazon, but when he discovered that you 
could not see one bank from the other, he lost, through 
some mysterious action of the soul that again I cannot 
understand, at least a tithe of the pleasure he had taken 
in that river. But he read all sort of things, a book of 
old Keltic stories collected by Joyce charmed him, and 
Mitford’s Tales of Old Japan, and a number of paper- 
covered volumes, Tales from Blackwood , he had acquired 
at Easewood, remained a stand-by. He developed a 
quite considerable acquaintance with the plays of William 
Shakespeare, and in his dreams he wore conque cento or 
Elizabethan clothes, and walked about a stormy, ruffling, 
taverning, teeming world. Great land of sublimated 
things, thou World of Books, happy asylum, refreshment 
and refuge from the world of everyday! . . . 

The essential thing of those fifteen long years of shop- 
keeping is Mr. Polly, well athwart the counter of his 
rather ill-lit shop, lost in a book, or rousing himself with 
a sigh to attend to business. 

Meanwhile he got little exercise, indigestion grew with 
him until it ruled all his moods, he fattened and deterio- 
rated physically, moods of distress invaded and darkened 
his skies, little things irritated him more and more, and 
casual laughter ceased in him. His hair began to come 


160 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


off until he had a large bald space at the back of his head. 
Suddenly one day it came to him — forgetful of those 
books and all he had lived and seen through them — that 
he had been in his shop for exactly fifteen years, that he 
would soon be forty, and that his life during that time 
had not been worth living, that it had been in apathetic 
and feebly hostile and critical company, ugly in detail 
and mean in scope — and that it had brought him at last 
to an outlook utterly hopeless and grey. 

Ill 

I have already had occasion to mention, indeed I have 
quoted, a certain high-browed gentleman living at High- 
bury, wearing a golden pince-nez and writing for the 
most part in that beautiful room, the library of the Re- 
form Club. There he wrestles with what he calls “ social 
problems ” in a bloodless but at times, I think one must 
admit, an extremely illuminating manner. He has a fixed 
idea that something called a “ collective intelligence ” is 
wanted in the world, which means in practice that you 
and I and everyone have to think about things frightfully 
hard and pool the results, and oblige ourselves to be 
shamelessly and persistently clear and truthful and sup- 
port and respect (I suppose) a perfect horde of profes- 
sors and writers and artists and ill-groomed difficult 
people, instead of using our brains in a moderate, sensible 
manner to play golf and bridge (pretending a sense of 
humour prevents our doing anything else with them) 
and generally taking life in a nice, easy, gentlemanly way, 


MAKING AN END TO THINGS 161 


confound him! Well, this dome-headed monster of in- 
tellect alleges that Mr. Polly was unhappy entirely 
through that. 

“ A rapidly complicating society,” he writes, “ which 
as a whole declines to contemplate its future or face 
the intricate problems of its organisation, is in exactly 
the position of a man who takes no thought of dietary 
or regimen, who abstains from baths and exercise and 
gives his appetites free play. It accumulates useless and 
aimless lives as a man accumulates fat and morbid prod- 
ucts in his blood, it declines in its collective efficiency 
and vigour and secretes discomfort and misery. Every 
phase of its evolution is accompanied by a maximum of 
avoidable distress and inconvenience and human 
waste. . . . 

“ Nothing can better demonstrate the collective dull- 
ness of our community, the crying need for a strenuous 
intellectual renewal than the consideration of that vast 
mass of useless, uncomfortable, under-educated, under- 
trained and altogether pitiable people we contemplate 
when we use that inaccurate and misleading term, the 
Lower Middle Class. A great proportion of the lower 
middle class should properly be assigned to the unem- 
ployed and the unemployable. They are only not that, 
because the possession of some small hoard of money, sav- 
ings during a period of wage earning, an insurance policy 
or suchlike capital, prevents a direct appeal to the rates. 
But they are doing little or nothing for the community 
in return for what they consume ; they have no under- 
standing of any relation of service to the community, 


1 62 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

they have never been trained nor their imaginations 
touched to any social purpose. A great proportion of 
small shopkeepers for example are people who have, 
through the inefficiency that comes from inadequate 
training and sheer aimlessless, or improvements in ma- 
chinery or the drift of trade, been thrown out of em- 
ployment, and who set up in needless shops as a method 
of eking out the savings upon which they count. They 
contrive to make sixty or seventy per cent, of their ex- 
penditure, the rest is drawn from the shrinking capital. 
Essentially their lives are failures, not the sharp and 
tragic failure of the labourer who gets out of work and 
starves, but a slow, chronic process of consecutive small 
loses which may end if the individual is exceptionally 
fortunate in an impoverished death bed before actual 
bankruptcy or destitution supervenes. Their chances of 
ascendant means are less in their shops than in any lottry 
that was ever planned. The secular development of 
transit and communications has made the organisation of 
distributing businesses upon large and economical lines, 
inevitable; except in the chaotic confusions of newly 
opened countries, the day when a man might earn an 
independant living by unskilled or practically unskilled 
retailing has gone for ever. Yet every year sees the 
melancholy procession towards petty bankruptcy and im- 
prisonment for debt go on, and there is no statesman- 
ship in us to avert it. Every issue of every trade journal 
has its four or five columns of abridged bankruptcy 
proceedings, nearly every item in which means the final 
collapse of another struggling family upon the resources 


MAKING AN END TO THINGS 163 

of the community, and continually a fresh supply of 
superfluous artisans and shop assistants, coming out of 
employment with savings or ‘ help ’ from relations, of 
widows with a husband’s insurance money, of the ill- 
trained sons of parsimonious fathers, replaces the fallen 
in the ill-equipped, jerry-built shops that everywhere 
abound. . . 

I quote these fragments from a gifted, if unpleasant 
contemporary for what they are worth. I feel this has 
come in here as the board aspect of this History. I come 
back to Mr. Polly sitting upon his gate and swearing in 
the east wind, and I so returning have a sense of floating 
across unbridged abysses between the General and the 
Particular. There, on the one hand, is the man of under- 
standing, seeing clearly — 'I suppose he sees clearly — the 
big process that dooms millions of lives to thwarting and 
discomfort and unhappy circumstances, and giving us no 
help, no hint, by which we may get that better “ collective 
will and intelligence ” which would dam the stream of 
human failure, and on the oher hand, Mr. Polly sitting on 
his gate, untrained, unwarned, confused, distressed, 
angry, seeing nothing except that he is as it were netted 
in greyness and discomfort — with life dancing all about 
him; Mr. Polly with a capacity for joy and beauty at 
least as keen and subtle as yours or mine. 

IV 

I have hinted that our Mother England had equipped 
Mr. Polly for the management of his internal concerns 


164 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

no whit better than she had for the direction of his ex- 
ternal affairs. With a careless generosity she affords 
her children a variety of foods unparalleled in the 
world’s history, and including many condiments and 
preserved preparations novel to the human economy. 
And Miriam did the cooking. Mr. Polly’s system, like a 
confused and ill-governed democracy, had been brought 
to a state of perpetual clamour and disorder, demanding 
now evil and unsuitable internal satisfactions, such as 
pickles and vinegar and the crackling on pork, and now 
vindictive external expression, war and bloodshed 
throughout the world. So that Mr. Polly had been led 
into hatred and a series of disagreeable quarrels with his 
landlord, his wholesalers, and most of his neighbours. 

Rumbold, the china dealer next door, seemed hostile 
from the first for no apparent reason, and always un- 
packed his crates with a full back to his new neighbour, 
and from the first Mr. Polly resented and hated that 
uncivil breadth of expressionless humanity, wanted to 
prod it, kick it, satirize it. But you cannot satirize a 
back, if you have no friend to nudge while you do it. 

At last Mr. Polly could stand it no longer. He ap- 
proached and prodded Rumbold. 

“ Elio ! ” said Rumbold, suddenly erect and turned 
about. 

“ Can’t we have some other point of view ? ” said Mr. 
Polly. “ Pm tired of the end elevation.” 

“ Eh ? ” said Mr. Rumbold, frankly puzzled. 

“Of all the vertebracious animals man alone raises 
his face to the sky, O’ man. Well, — why invert it? ” 


MAKING AN END TO THINGS 165 

Rumbold shook his head with a helpless expression. 

“ Don’t like so much Arreary Pensy” 

Rumbold distressed in utter obscurity. 

“ In fact, I’m sick of your turning your back on me, 
see?” 

A great light shone on Rumbold. " That's what you’re 
talking about ! ” he said. 

“ That’s it,” said Polly. 

Rumbold scratched his ear with the three strawy jam- 
pots he held in his hand. “ Way the wind blows, I ex- 
pect,” he said. “ But what’s the fuss? ” 

“ No fuss ! ” said Mr. Polly. “ Passing Remark. I 
don’t like it, O’ man, that’s all.” 

“ Can’t help it, if the wind blows my stror,” said Mr. 
Rumbold, still far from clear about it. . . . 

“ It isn’t ordinary civility,” said Mr. Polly. 

“ Got to unpack ’ow it suits me. Can’t unpack with 
the stror blowing into one’s eyes.” 

“ Needn’t unpack like a pig rooting for truffles, need 
you?” 

“ Truffles?” 

“ Needn’t unpack like a pig.” 

Mr. Rumbold apprehended something. 

“ Pig ! ” he said, impressed. “ You calling me a 
Pig?” 

“ It’s the side I seem to get of you.” 

“ Ere,” said Mr. Rumbold, suddenly fierce and shout- 
ing and marking his point with gesticulated jampots, 
“ you go indoors. I don’t want no row with you, and I 
don’t want you to row with me. I don’t know what 


1 66 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


you’re after, but I’m a peaceable man — teetotaller, too, 
and a good thing if you was. See? You go indoors!” 

“ You mean to say — -I’m asking you civilly to stop 
unpacking — with your back to me.” 

“ Pig ain’t civil, and you ain’t sober. You go indoors 
and lemme go on unpacking. You — you’re excited.” 

“ D’you mean ! ” Mr. Polly was foiled. 

He perceived an immense stolidity about Rumbold. 

“ Get back to your shop and lemme get on with my 
business,” said Mr. Rumbold. “ Stop calling me pigs. 
See? Sweep your pa vemint.” 

“ I came here to make a civil request.” 

“ You came ’ere to make a row. I don’t want no 
truck with you. See? I don’t like the looks of you. 
See ? And I can’t stand ’ere all day arguing. See ? ” 

Pause of mutual inspection. 

It occurred to Mr. Polly that probably he was to some 
extent in the wrong. 

Mr. Rumbold, blowing heavily, walked past him, de- 
posited the jampots in his shop with an immense affec- 
tation that there was no Mr. Polly in the world, returned, 
turned a scornful back on Mr. Polly and dived to the 
interior of the crate. Mr. Polly stood baffled. Should 
he kick this solid mass before him? Should he admin- 
ister a resounding kick? 

No! 

He plunged his hands deepy into his trouser pockets, 
began to whistle and returned to his own doorstep with 
an air of profound unconcern. There for a time, to 
the tune of “ Men of Harlech,” he contemplated the re- 


MAKING AN END TO THINGS 167 

ceding possibility of kicking Mr. Rumbold hard. It 
would be splendid — and for the moment satisfying. But 
he decided not to do it. For indefinable reasons he 
could not do it. He went indoors and straightened up 
his dress ties very slowly and thoughtfully. Presently 
he went to the window and regarded Mr. Rumbold 
obliquely. Mr. Rumbold was still unpacking. ... 

Mr. Polly had no human intercourse thereafter with 
Rumbold for fifteen years. He kept up a Hate. 

There was a time when it seemed as if Rumbold 
might go, but he had a meeting of his creditors and then 
went on unpacking as obtusely as ever. 

V 

Hinks, the saddler, two shops further down the street, 
was a different case. Hinks was the aggressor — practi- 
cally. 

Hinks was a sporting man in his way, with that taste 
for checks in costume and tight trousers which is, under 
Providence, so mysteriously and invariably associated 
with equestrian proclivities. At first Mr. Polly took to 
him as a character, became frequent in the God’s Provi- 
dence Inn under his guidance, stood and was stood 
drinks and concealed a great ignorance of horses until 
Hinks became urgent for him to play billiards or bet. 

Then Mr. Pooly took to evading him, and Hinks 
ceased to conceal his opinion that Mr. Polly was in reality 
a softish sort of flat. 


1 68 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

He did not, however, discontinue conversation with 
Mr. Polly, he would come along to him whenever he 
appeared at his door, and converse about sport and 
women and fisticuffs and the pride of life with an air of 
extreme initiation, until Mr. Polly felt himself the faint- 
est underdeveloped intimation of a man that had ever 
hovered on the verge of non-existence. 

So he invented phrases for Hinks’ clothes and took 
Rusper, the ironmonger, into his confidence upon the 
weaknesses of Hinks. He called him the “ Chequered 
Careerist,” and spoke of his patterned legs as “ shivery 
shakys.” Good things of this sort are apt to get round 
to people. 

He was standing at his door one day, feeling bored, 
when Hinks appeared down the street, stood still and 
regarded him with a strange malignant expression for a 
space. 

Mr. Polly waved a hand in a rather belated salutation. 

Mr. Hinks spat on the pavement and appeared to re- 
flect. Then he came towards Mr. Polly portentously and 
paused, and spoke between his teeth in an earnest con- 
fidential tone. 

“ You been flapping your mouth about me, Pm told,” 
he said. 

Mr. Polly felt suddenly spiritless. “ Not that I know 
of,” he answered. 

“ Not that you know of, be blowed ! You been flapping 
your mouth.” 

“ Don’t see it,” said Mr. Polly. 

“ Don’t see it, be blowed! You go flapping your silly 


MAKING AN END TO THINGS 169 

mouth about me and I’ll give you a poke in the eye. 
See? ” 

Mr. Hinks regarded the effect of this coldly but firmly, 
and spat again. 

“ Understand me ? ” he enquired. 

“ Don’t recollect,” began Mr. Polly. 

“ Don’t recollect, be blowed ! You flap your mouth a 
dam sight too much. This place gets more of your 
mouth than it wants. . . . Seen this ? ” 

And Mr. Hinks, having displayed a freckled fist of 
extraordinary size and pugginess in an ostentatiously 
familiar manner to Mr. Polly’s close inspection by sight 
and smell, turned it about this way and that, shaken it 
gently for a moment or so, replaced it carefully in his 
pocket as if for future use, receded slowly and watch- 
fully for a pace, and then turned away as if to other 
matters, and ceased to be even in outward seeming a 
friend. . . 

VI 

Mr. Polly’s intercourse with all his fellow tradesmen 
was tarnished sooner or later by some such adverse inci- 
dent, until not a friend remained to him, and loneliness 
made even the shop door terrible. Shops bankrupted all 
about him and fresh people came and new acquaintances 
sprang up, but sooner or later a discord was inevitable, 
the tension under which these badly fed, poorly housed, 
bored and bothered neighbours lived, made it inevitable. 
Then mere fact that Mr. Polly had to see them every 
day, that there was no getting away from them, was in 


170 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

itslf sufficient to make them almost unendurable to his 
frettingly active mind. 

Among other shopkeepers in the High Street there 
was Chuffles, the grocer, a small, hairy, silently intent, 
polygamist, who was given rough music by the youth of 
the neighbourhood because o fa scandal about his wife’s 
sister, and who was nevertheless totally uninteresting, and 
Tonks, the second grocer, an old man with an older, 
very enfeebled wife, both submerged by piety. Tonks 
went bankrupt, and was succeeded by a branch of the 
National Provision Company, with a young manager 
exactly like a fox, except that he barked. The toy and 
sweetstuff shop was kept by an old woman of repellent 
manners and so was the little fish shop at the end of 
the street. The Berlin-wool shop having gone bankrupt, 
became a newspaper shop, then fell to a haberdasher in 
consumption, and finally to a stationer; the three shops 
at the end of the street wallowed in and out of insol- 
vency in the hands of a bicycle repa^er and dealer, a 
gramaphone dealer, a tobacconist, a sixpenny-halfpenny 
bazaar-keeper, a shoemaker, a greengrocer, and the ex- 
ploiter of a cinematograph pee-show — but none of them 
supplied friendship to Mr. Polly. The adventurers in 
commerce were all more or less distraught souls, driving 
without intelligible comment before the gale of fate. 
The two milkmen of Fishbourne were brothers who had 
quarrelled about their father’s will, and started in op- 
position to each other; one was stone deaf and no use 
to Mr. Polly, and the other was a sporting man with a 
natural dread of epithet who sided with Hinks. So it 


MAKING AN END TO THINGS 171 

was all about him, on every hand it seemed were uncon- 
genial people, uninteresting people, or people who con- 
ceived the deepest distrust and hostility towards him, a 
magic circle of suspicious, preoccupied and dehumanised 
humanity. So the poison in his system poisoned the 
world without. 

(But Boomer, the wine merchant, and Tashingford, 
the chemist, be it noted, were fraught with pride, and 
held themselves to be a cut above Mr. Polly. They never 
quarrelled with him, preferring to bear themselves from 
the outset as though they had already done so.) 

As his internal malady grew upon Mr. Polly and he 
became more and more a battle-ground of fermenting 
foods and warring juices, he came to hate the very 
sight, as people say, of every one of these neighbours. 
There they were, every day and all the days, just the 
same, echoing his own stagnation They pained him all 
round the top and back of his head ; they made his legs 
and arms weary and spiritless. The air was tasteless by 
reason of them. He lost his human kindliness. 

In the afternoons he would hover in the shop bored 
to death with his business and his home and Miriam, and 
yet afraid to go out because of his inflamed and magni- 
fied dislike and dread of these neighbours. He could not 
bring himself to go out and run the gauntlet of the ob- 
servant windows and the cold estranged eyes. 

One of his last friendships was with Rusper, the 
ironmonger. Rusper took over Worthington’s shop 
about three years after Mr. Polly opened. He was a 
tall, lean, nervous, convulsive man with an upturned, 


172 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


back-thrown, oval head, who read newspapers and the 
Review of Reviews assiduously, had belonged to a Liter- 
ary Society somewhere once, and had some defect of the 
palate that at first gave his lightest word a charm and 
interest for Mr. Polly. It caused a peculiar clicking 
sound, as though he had something between a giggle 
and a gas-meter at work in his neck. 

Plis literary admirations were not precisely Mr. Polly’s 
literary admirations ; he thought books were written to 
enshrine Great Thoughts, and that art was pedagogy in 
fancy dress, he had no sense of phrase or epithet or 
richness of texture, but still he knew there were books, 
he did know there were books and he was full of large 
windy ideas of the sort he called “ Modern (kik) 
Thought,” and seemed needlessly and helplessly con- 
cerned about “(kik) the Welfare of the Race.” 

Mr. Polly would dream about that (kik) at nights. 

It seemed to that undesirable mind of his that Rusper’s 
head was the most egg-shaped head he had ever seen; 
the similarity weighed upon him ; and when he found 
an argument growing warm with Rusper he would say: 
“ Boil it some more, O’ man ; boil it harder ! ” or “ Six 
minutes at least,” allusions Rusper could never make 
head or tail of, and got at last to disregard as a part of 
Mr. Polly’s general eccentricity. For a long time that 
little tendency threw no shadow over their intercourse, 
but it contained within it the seeds of an ultimate dis- 
ruption. 

Often during the days of this friendship Mr. Polly 
would leave his shop and walk over to Mr. Rusper’s 


MAKING AN END TO THINGS 


173 


establishment, and stand in his doorway and enquire : 
“ Well, O’ man, how’s the Mind of the Age working?” 
and get quite an hour of it, and sometimes Mr. Rusper 
would come into the outfitter’s shop with “ Heard the 
(kik) latest?” and spend the rest of the morning. 

Then Mr. Rusper married, and he married very in- 
considerately a woman who was totally uninteresting to 
Mr. Polly. A coolness grew between them from the 
first intimation of her advent. Mr. Polly couldn’t help 
thinking when he saw her that she drew her hair back 
from her forehead a great deal too tightly, and that her 
elbows were angular. His desire not to mention these 
things in the apt terms that welled up so richly in his 
mind, made him awkward in her presence, and that 
gave her an impression that he was hiding some guilty 
secret from her. She decided he must have a bad in- 
fluence upon her husband, and she made it a point to ap- 
pear whenever she heard him talking to Rusper. 

One day they became a little heated about the German 
peril. 

“ I lay (kik) they’ll invade us,” said Rusper. 

“ Not a bit of it. William’s not the Xerxiacious sort.” 

“ You’ll see, O’ man.” 

“ Just what I shan’t do.” 

“ Before (kik) five years are out.” 

“ Not it.” 

“ Yes.” 

“ No.” 

“ Yes.” 

“ Oh ! Boil it hard ! ” said Mr. Polly. 


174 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


Then he looked up and saw Mrs. Rusper standing be- 
hind the counter half hidden by a trophy of spades and 
garden shears and a knife-cleaning machine, and by 
her expression he knew instantly that she understood. 

The conversation paled and presently Mr. Polly with- 
drew. 

After that, estrangement increased steadily. 

Mr. Rusper ceased altogether to come over to the out- 
fitter’s, and Mr. Polly called upon the ironmonger only 
with the completest air of casuality. And everything 
they said to each other led now to flat contradiction and 
raised voices. Rusper had been warned in vague and 
alarming terms that Mr. Polly insulted and made game 
of him; he couldn’t discover exactly where; and so it 
appeared to him now that every word of Mr. Polly’s 
might be an insult meriting his resentment, meriting it 
none the less because it was masked and cloaked. 

Soon Mr. Polly’s calls upon Mr. Rusper ceased also, 
and then Mr. Rusper, pursuing incomprehensible lines 
of thought, became afflicted with a specialised short- 
sightedness that applied only to Mr. Polly. He would 
look in other directions when Mr. Polly appeared, and 
his large oval face assumed an expression of conscious 
serenity and deliberate happy unawareness that would 
have maddened a far less irritable person than Mr. Polly. 
It evoked a strong desire to mock and ape, and produced 
in his throat a cough of singular scornfulness, more par- 
ticularly when Mr. Rusper also assisted, with an as- 
sumed unconsciousness that was all his own. 

Then one day Mr. Polly had a bicycle accident. 


MAKING AN END TO THINGS 


175 


His bicycle was now very old, and it is one of the 
concomitants of a bicycle’s senility that its free wheel 
should one day obstinately cease to be free. It corre- 
sponds to that epoch in human decay when an old gen- 
tleman loses an incisor tooth. It happened just as Mr. 
Polly was approaching Mr. Rusper’s shop, and the un- 
toward chance of a motor car trying to pass a waggon 
on the wrong side gave Mr. Polly no choice but to get 
on to the pavement and dismount. He was always ac- 
customed to take his time and step off his left pedal at 
its lowest point, but the jamming of the free wheel gear 
made that lowest moment a transitory one, and the pedal 
was lifting his foot for another revolution before he 
realised what had happened. Before he could dismount 
according to his habit the pedal had to make a revolu- 
tion, and before it could make a revolution Mr. Polly 
found himself among the various sonorous things with 
which Mr. Rusper adorned the front of his shop, zinc 
dustbins, household pails, lawn mowers, rakes, spades 
and all maner of clattering things. Before he got 
among them he ha done o fthose agonising moments of 
helpless wrath and suspense that seem to last ages, in 
which one seems to perceive everything and think of 
nothing but words that are better forgotten. He sent a 
column of pails thundering across the doorway and dis- 
mounted with one foot in a sanitary dustbin amidst an 
enormous uproar of falling ironmongery. 

“ Put all over the place ! ” he cried, and found Mr. 
Rusper emerging from his shop with the large tranquilli- 
ties of his countenance puckered to anger, like the frowns 


176 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

in the brow of a reefing sail. He gesticulated speech- 
lessly for a moment. 

“ Kik — jer doing? ” he said at last. 

“ Tin mantraps ! ” said Mr. Polly. 

" Jer (kik) doing?” 

“ Dressing all over the pavement as though the blessed 
town belonged to you ! Ugh ! ” 

And Mr. Polly in attempting a dignified movement 
realised his entanglement with the dustbin for the first 
time. With a low embittering expression he kicked his 
foot about in it for a moment very noisily, and finally 
sent it thundering to the curb. On its way it struck a 
pail or so. Then Mr. Polly picked up his bicycle and 
proposed to resume his homeward way. But the hand of 
Mr. Rusper arrested him. 

"Put it (kik) all (kik kik) back (kik).” 

“ Put it (kik) back yourself.” 

“ You got (kik) put it back.” 

"Get out of the (kik) way.” 

Mr. Rusper laid one hand on the bicycle handle, and 
the other gripped Mr. Polly’s collar ungently. Where- 
upon Mr. Polly said : " Leggo ! ” and again, " D’you 

hear! Leggo! ” and then drove his elbow with consid- 
erable force into the region of Mr. Rusper’s midriff. 
Whereupon Mr. Rusper, with a loud impassioned cry, re- 
sembling "Woo kik” more than any other combination 
of letters, released the bicycle handle, seized Mr. Polly 
by the cap and hair and bore his head and shoulders 
downward. Thereat Mr. Polly, emitting such words as 
everyone knows and nobody prints, butted his utmost 


MAKING AN END TO THINGS 177 

into the concavity of Mr. Rusper, entwined a leg about 
him and after terrific moments of swaying instability, 
fell headlong beneath him amidst the bicycles and pails. 
There on the pavement these inexpert children o fa pacific 
age, unrained in arms and uninured to violence, aband- 
oned themselves to amateurish and absurd efforts to hurt 
and injure one another — of which the most palpable 
consequences were dusty backs, ruffled hair and torn and 
twisted collars. Mr. Polly, by accident,, got his finger into 
Mr. Rusper’s mouth, and strove earnestly for some time 
to prolong that aperture in the direction of Mr. Rusper’s 
ear before it occurred to Mr. Rusper to bite him (and 
even then he didn’t bite very hard), while Mr. Rusper 
concentrated his mind almost entirely on an effort to rub 
Mr. Polly’s face on the pavement. (And their positions 
bristled with chances of the deadliest sort !) They didn’t 
from first to last draw blood. 

Then it seemed to each of them that the other had be- 
come endowed with many hands and several voices and 
great accessions of strength. They submitted to fate 
and ceased to struggle. They found themselves torn 
apart and held up by outwardly scandalised and in- 
wardly delighted neighbours, and invited to explain what 
it was all about. 

“Got to (kik) puttem all back!” panted Mr. Rusper 
in the expert grasp of Prinks. “ Merely asked him to 
(kik) puttem all back.” 

Mr. Polly was under restraint of little Clamp, of the 
toy shop, who was holding his hands in a complex and 
uncomfortable manner that he afterwards explained to 


178 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

Wintershed was a combination of something romantic 
called “ Ju-jitsu ” and something else still more romantic 
called the “ Police Grip.” 

“ Pails,” explained Mr. Polly in breathless fragments. 
“ All over the road. Pails. Bungs up the street with 
his pails. Look at them ! ” 

“ Deliber (kik) lib ( kik) liberately rode into my 
goods (kik). Constantly (kik) annoying me (kik)!” 
said Mr. Rusper. . . . 

They were both tremendously earnest and reasonable 
in their manner. They wished everyone to regard them 
as responsible and intellectual men acting for the love 
of right and the endearing good of the world. They felt 
they must treat this business as a profound and publicly 
significant affair. They wanted to explain and orate and 
show the entire necessity of everything they had done. 
Mr. Polly was convinced he had never been so abso- 
lutely correct in all his life as when he planted his foot 
in the sanitary dustbin, and Mr. Rusper considered his 
clutch at Mr. Polly’s hair as the one faultless impulse 
in an otherwise undistinguished career. But it was clear 
in their minds they might easily become ridiculous if 
they were not careful, if for a second they stepped over 
the edge of the high spirit and pitiless dignity they had 
hitherto maintained. At any cost they perceived they 
must not become ridiculous. 

Mr. Chuffles, the scandalous grocer, joined the throng 
about the principal combatants, mutely as became an 
outcast, and wit ha sad, distressed, helpful expresion 
picked up Mr. Polly’s bicycle. Gambell’s summer er- 


MAKING AN END TO THINGS 179 

rand boy, moved by example, restored the dustbin and 
pails to their self-respect. 

“ ’E ought — ’E ought (kik) pick them up,” protested 
Mr. Rusper. 

“What’s it all about?” said Mr. Hinks for the third 
time, shaking Mr. Rusper gently. “ ’As ’e been calling 
you names ? ” 

“ Simply ran into his pails — as anyone might,” said 
Mr. Polly, “ and out he comes and scrags me ! ” 

“ (kik) Assault!” said Mr. Rusper. 

“ He assaulted me,” said Mr. Polly. 

“Jumped (kik) into my dus’bin!” said Mr. Rusper. 
“That assault? Or isn’t it?” 

“ You better drop it,” said Mr. Hinks. 

“ Great pity they can’t be’ave better, both of ’em,” 
said Mr. Chuffles, glad for once to find himself morally 
unassailable. 

“ Anyone see it begin ? ” said Mr. Wintershed. 

“ I was in the shop,” said Mrs. Rusper suddenly from 
the doorstep, piercing the little group of men and boys 
with the sharp horror of an unexpected woman’s voice. 
“ If a witness is wanted I suppose I’ve got a tongue. I 
suppose I got a voice in seeing my own ’usband injured. 
My husband went out and spoke to Mr. Polly, who was 
jumping off his bicycle all among our pails and things, 
and immediately ’E butted him in the stomach — immedi- 
ately — most savagely — butted him. Just after his dinner 
too and him far from strong. I could have screamed. 
But Rusper caught hold of him right away, I will say 
that for Rusper. . . 


180 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

“ I’m going,” said Mr. Polly suddenly, releasing hirr,- 
self from the Anglo- Japanese grip and holding out his 
hands for his bicycle. 

“ Teach you (kik) to leave things alone,” said Mr. 
Rusper with an air of one who has given a lesson. 

The testimony of Mrs. Rusper continued relentlessly in 
the background. 

“ You’ll hear of me through a summons,” said Mr. 
Polly preparing to wheel his bicycle. 

“ (kik) Me too,” said Mr. Rusper. 

Someone handed Mr. Polly a collar. “ This yours ? ” 

Mr. Polly investigated his neck. “ I suppose it is. 
Anyone seen a tie ? ” 

A small boy produced a grimy strip of spotted blue 
silk. 

“ Human life isn’t safe with you,” said Mr. Polly as a 
parting shot. 

“ (kik) Yours isn’t,” said Mr. Rusper. . . . 

And they got small satisfaction out of the Bench, 
which refused altogether to perceive the relentless cor- 
rectitude of the behaviour of either party, and reproved 
the eagerness of Mrs. Rusper — speaking to her gently, 
firmly but exasperatingly as “ My Good Woman ” and 
telling her to “ Answer the Question ! Answer the 
Question ! ” 

“ Seems a Pity,” said the chairman, when binding 
them over to keep the peace, “ you can’t behave like Re- 
spectable Tradesmen. Seems a Great Pity. Bad Exam- 
ple to the Young and all that. Don’t do any Good to 


MAKING AN END TO THINGS 


181 


the town, don’t do any Good to yourselves, don’t do any 
manner of Good, to have all the Tradesmen in the Place 
scrapping about the Pavement of an Afternoon. Think 
we’re letting you off very easily this time, and hope it 
will be a Warning to you. Don’t expect Men of your 
Position to come up before us. Very Regrettable Af- 
fair. Eh?” 

He addressed the latter enquiry to his two colleagues. 

“ Exactly, exactly,” said the colleague to the right. 

“Er — (kik),” said Mr. Rusper. 

VII 

But the disgust that overshadowed Mr. Polly’s being 
as he sat upon the stile, had other and profounder justi- 
fication than his quarrel with Rusper and the indignity 
of appearing before the county bench. He was for the 
first time in his business career short with his rent for 
the approaching quarter day, and so far as he could 
trust his own handling of figures he was sixty or seventy 
pounds on the wrong side of solvency. And that was 
the outcome of fifteen years of passive endurance of dull- 
ness throughout the best years of his life! What would 
Mariam say when she learnt this, and was invited to 
face the prospect of exile — heaven knows what sort of 
exile — from their present home? She would grumble 
and scold and become limply unhelpful, he knew, and 
none the less so because he could not help things. She 
would say he ought to have worked harder, and a hun- 
dred such exasperating pointless things. Such thoughts 


182 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

as these require no aid from undigested cold pork and 
cold potatoes and pickles to darken the soul, and with 
these aids his soul was black indeed. ffl 

“ May as well have a bit of a walk,” said Mr. Polly 
at last, after nearly intolerable medtations, and sat round 
and put a leg over the stile. 

He remained still for some time before he brought 
over the other leg. 

“ Kill myself,” he murmured at last. 

It was an idea that came back to his mind nowadays 
with a continually increasing attractiveness — more par- 
ticularly after meals. Life he felt had no further happi- 
ness to offer him. He hated Miriam, and there was no 
getting away from her whatever might betide. And for 
the rest there was toil and struggle, toil and struggle 
with a failing heart and dwindling courage, to sustain 
that dreary duologue. “ Life’s insured,” said Mr. Polly ; 
“ place is insured. I don’t see it does any harm to her 
or anyone.” 

He stuck his hands in his pockets. “ Needn’t hurt 
much,” he said. He began to elaborate a plan. 

He found it quite interesting elaborating his pHn. 
His countenance became less miserable and his pace 
quickened. 

There is nothing so good in all the world for mel- 
ancholia as walking, and the exercise of the imagination 
in planning something presently to be done, and soon 
the wrathful wretchedness had vanished from Mr. Tolly’s 
face. He would have to do the thing secretly and 
elaborately, because otherwise there might be difficulties 


MAKING AN END TO THINGS 183 

about the life insurance. He began to scheme how he 
could circumvent that difficulty. . . . 

He took a long walk, for after all what is the good of 
hurrying back to shop when you are not only insolvent 
but very soon to die? His dinner and the east wind lost 
their sinister hold upon his soul, and when at last he 
came back along the Fishbourne High Street, his face 
was unusually bright and the craving hunger of the 
dyspeptic was returning. So he went into the grocer’s 
and bought a ruddily decorated tin of a brightly pink 
fishlike substance known as “ Deep Sea Salmon.” This 
he was resolved to consume regardless of cost with 
vinegar and salt and pepper as a relish to his supper. 

He did, and since he and Miriam rarely talked and 
Miriam thought honour and his recent behaviour de- 
manded a hostile silence, he ate fast, and copiously and 
soon gloomily. He ate alone, for she refrained to mark 
her sense of his extravagance. Then he prowled into 
the Hight Street for a time, thought it an infernal place, 
tried his pipe and found it foul and bitter, and retired 
wearily to bed. 

He slept for an hour or so and then woke up to the 
contemplation of Miriam’s hunched back and the riddle 
of life, and this bright attractive idea of ending for ever 
and ever and ever all the things that were locking him 
in, this bright idea that shone like a baleful star above all 
the reek and darkness of his misery. . . . 


CHAPTER THE EIGHTH 


MAKING AN END TO THINGS 

I 

M R. POLLY designed his suicide with consid- 
erable care, and a quite remarkable altruism. 
His passionate hatred for Miriam vanished 
directly the idea of getting away from her for ever be- 
came clear in his mind. He found himself full of solici- 
tude than for her welfare. He did not want to buy his 
release at her expense. He had not the remotest inten- 
tion of leaving her unprotected with a painfully dead 
husband and a bankrupt shop on her hands. It seemed 
to him that he could contrive to secure for her the full 
benefit of both his life insurance and his fire insurance 
if he managed things in a tactful manner. He felt hap- 
pier than he had done for years scheming out this un- 
dertaking, albeit it was perhaps a larger and somberer 
kind of happiness than had fallen to his lot before. It 
amazed him to think he had endured his monotony of 
misery and failure for so long. 

But there were some queer doubts and questions in 
the dim, half-lit background of his mind that he had 
very resolutely to ignore. 

“ Sick of it,” he had to repeat to himself aloud, to 
184 


MAKING AN END TO THINGS 185 

keep his determination clear and firm. His life was a 
failure, there was nothing more to hope for but unhap- 
piness. Why shouldn’t he? 

His project was to begin the fire with the stairs that 
led from the ground floor to the underground kitchen 
and scullery. This he would soak with parrafflne, and 
assist with firewood and paper, and a brisk fire in the 
coal cellar underneath. He would smash a hole or so in 
the stairs to ventilate the blaze, and have a good pile of 
boxes and paper, and a convenient chair or so in the 
shop above. He would have the paraffine can upset and 
the shop lamp, as if awaiting refilling, at a convenient 
distance in the scullery ready to catch. Then he would 
smash the house lamp on the staircase, a fall with that 
in his hand was to be the ostensible cause of the blaze, 
and then he would cut his throat at the top of the kitchen 
stairs, which would then become his funeral pyre. He 
would do all this on Sunday evening while Miriam was 
at church, and it would appear that he had fallen down- 
stairs with the lamp, and been burnt to death. There 
was really no flaw whatever tfiat he could see in the 
scheme. He was quite sure he knew how to cut his 
throat deep at the side and not to saw at the windpipe, 
and he was reasonably sure it wouldn’t hurt him very 
much. And then everything would be at an end. 

There was no particular hurry to get the thing done 
of course, and meanwhile he occupied his mind with 
possible variations of the scheme. . . . 

It needed a particularly dry and dusty east wind, a 
Sunday dinner of exceptional virulence, a conclusive let- 


1 86 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


ter from Konk, Maybrick, 'Ghool and Gabbitas, his prin- 
cipal and most urgent creditors, and a conversation with 
Miriam arising out of arrears of rent and leading on to 
mutual character sketching, before Mr. Polly could be 
brought to the necessary pitch of despair to carry out 
his plans. He went for an embittering walk, and came 
back to find Miriam in a bad temper over the tea things, 
with the brewings of three-quarters of an hour in the 
pot, and hot buttered muffin gone leathery. He sat eat- 
ing in silence with his resolution made. 

“ Coming to church ? ” said Miriam after she had 
cleared away. 

“ Rather. I got a lot to be grateful for,” said Mr. 
Polly. 

“ You got what you deserve,” said Miriam. 

“ Suppose I have,” said Mr. Polly, and went and 
stared out of the back window at a despondent horse in 
the hotel yard. 

He was still standing there when Miriam came down- 
stairs dressed for church. Something in his immobility 
struck home to her. “ You’d better come to church than 
mope,” she said. 

“ I shan’t mope,” he answered. 

She remained still for a moment. Her presence irri- 
tated him. He felt that in another moment he should 
say something absurd to her, make some last appeal for 
that understanding she had never been able to give. 
“ Oh ! go to church ! ” he said. 

In another moment the outer door slammed upon 
her. “ Good riddance ! ” said Mr. Polly. 


MAKING AN END TO THINGS 187 

He turned about. “ I’ve had my whack,” he said. 

He reflected. “ I don’t see she’ll have any cause to 
holler,” he said. “Beastly Home! Beastly Life!” 

For a space he remained thoughtful. “ Here goes ! ” 
he said at last. 


II 

For twenty minutes Mr. Polly busied himself about the 
house, making his preparations very neatly and methodi- 
cally. 

He opened the attic windows in order to make sure of 
a good draught through the house, and drew down the 
blinds at the back and shut the kitchen door to conceal 
his arrangements from casual observation. At the end 
he would open the door on the yard and so make a clean 
clear draught right through the house. He hacked at, 
and wedged, the tread of a stair. He cleared out the 
coals from under the staircase, and built a neat fire of 
firewood and paper there, he splashed about paraffine 
and arranged the lamps and can even as he had designed, 
and made a fine inflammable pile of things in the little 
parlour behind the shop. “ Looks pretty arsonical,” he 
said as he surveyed it all. “ Wouldn’t do to have a 
caller now. Now for the stairs ! ” 

“ Plenty of time,” he assured himself, and took the 
lamp which was to explain the whole affair, and went to 
the head of the staircase between the scullery and the 
parlour. He sat down in the twilight with the unlit lamp 
beside him and surveyed things. He must light the fire 
in the coal cellar under the stairs, open the back door, 


1 88 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


then come up them very quickly and light the paraffine 
puddles on each step, then sit down here again and cut 
his throat. He drew his razor from his pocket and felt 
the edge. It wouldn’t hurt much, and in ten minutes 
he would be indistinguishable ashes in the blaze. 

And this was the end of life for him ! 

The end! And it seemed to him now that life had 
never begun for him, never! It was as if his soul had 
been cramped and his eyes bandaged from the hour of 
his birth. Why had he lived such a life? Why had he 
submitted to things, blundered into things? Why had 
he never insisted on the things he thought beautiful and 
and the things he desired, never sought them, fought for 
them, taken any risk for them, died rather than abandon 
them? They were the things that mattered. Safety did 
not matter. A living did not matter unless there were 
things to live for. . . . 

He had been a fool, a coward and a fool, h had been 
fooled too, for no one had ever warned him to take a 
firm hold upon life, no one had ever told him of the lit- 
tleness of fear, or pain, or death ; but what was the good 
of going through it now again? It was over and done 
with. 

The clock in the back parlour pinged the half hour. 

“ Time ! ” said Mr. Polly, and stood up. 

For an instant he battled with an impulse to put it all 
back, hastily, guiltily, and abandon this desperate plan 
of suicide for ever. 

But Miriam would smell the paraffine! 


MAKING AN END TO THINGS 189 

“ Nc way out this time. O’ man,” said Mr. Polly; and 
he went slowly downstairs, match box in hand. 

He paused for five seconds, perhaps, to listen to noises 
in the yard of the Royal Fishbourne Hotel before he 
struck his match. It trembled a little in his hand. The 
paper blackened, and an edge of blue flame ran outward 
and spread. The fire burnt up readily, and in an instant 
the wood was cackling cheerfully. 

Someone might hear. He must hurry. 

He lit a pool of paraffine on the scullery floor, and in- 
stantly a nest of snaky, wavering blue flame became 
agog for pi;ey. He went up the stairs three steps at a 
time with one eager blue flicker in pursuit of him. He 
seized the lamp at the top. “ Now ! ” he said and flung 
it smashing. The chimney broke, but the glass receiver 
stood the shock and rolled to the bottom, a potential 
bomb. Old Rumbold would hear that and wonder what 
it was ! . . . He’d know soon enough ! 

Then Mr. Polly stood hesitating, razor in hand, and 
then sat down. He was trembling violently, but quite 
unafraid. 

He drew the blade lightly under one ear. “ Lord ! ” 
but it stung like a nettle ! 

Then he perceived a little blue thread of flame run- 
ning up his leg. It arrested his attention, and for a 
moment he sat, razor in hand, staring at it. It must be 
paraffine on his trousers that had caught fire on the 
stairs. Of course his legs were wet with paraffine! He 
smacked the flicker with his hand to put it out, and felt 
his leg burn as he did so. But his trousers still charred 


190 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


and glowed. It seemed to him necessary that he must 
put this out before he cut his throat. He put down the 
razor beside him to smack with both hands very eagerly. 
And as he did so a thin tall red flame came up through 
the hole in the stairs he had made and stood still, quite 
still as it seemed, and looked at him. It was a strange- 
looking flame, a flattish salmon colour, redly streaked. 
It was so queer and quiet mannered that the sight of it 
held Mr. Polly agape. 

“ Whuff ! ” went the can of paraffine below, and boiled 
oiver with stinking white fire. At the outbreak the 
salmon coloured flames shivered and ducked and then 
doubled and vanished, and instantly all the staircase was 
noisily ablaze. 

Mr. Polly sprang up and backwards, as though the 
uprushing tongues of fire were a pack of eager wolves. 

“ Good Lord ! ” he cried like a man who wakes up 
from a dream. 

He swore sharply and slapped again at a recrudescent 
flame upon his leg. 

“ What the Deuce shall I do ? I’m soaked with the 
confounded stuff ! ” 

He had nerved himself for throat-cutting, but this was 
fire ! 

He wanted to delay things, to put them out for a mo- 
ment while he did his business. The idea of arresting 
all this hurry with water occurred to him. 

There was no water in the little parlour and none in 
the shop. He hesitated for a moment whether he should 
not run upstairs to the bedrooms and get a ewer of water 


MAKING AN END TO THINGS 


191 

to throw on the flames. At this rate Rumbold’s would 
be ablaze in five minutes ! Things were going all too 
fast for Mr. Polly. He ran towards the staircase door, 
and it hot breath pulled him up sharply. Then he dashed 
out through his shop. The catch of the front door was 
sometimes obstinate, it was now, and instantly he became 
frantic. He rattled and stormed and felt the parlour al- 
ready ablaze behind him. In another moment he was in 
the Hight Street with the door wide open. 

The staircase behind him was crackling now like horse- 
whips and pistol shots. 

He had a vague sense that he wasn’t doing as he had 
proposed, but the chief thing was his sense of that un- 
controlled fire within. What was he going to do? 
There was the fire brigade station next door but one. 

The Fishbourne High Street had never seemed so 
empty. 

Far off at the corner by the God’s Providence Inn a 
group of three stiff hobbledehoys in their black, best 
clothes, conversed intermittently with Taplow, the po- 
liceman. 

“ Hi ! ” bawled Mr. Polly to them. “ Fire ! Fire ! ” 
and struck by a horrible thought, the thought of Rum- 
bold’s deaf mother-in-law upstairs, began to bang and 
kick and rattle with the utmost fury at Rumbold’s shop 
door. 

“ Hi!” he repeated, “Fire!” 


192 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


III 

That was the beginning of the great Fishbourne fire, 
which burnt its way sideways into Mr. Rusper’s piles of 
crates and straw, and backwards to the petrol and sta- 
bling of the Royal Fishbourne Hotel, and spread from 
that basis until it seemed half Fishbourne would be 
ablaze The east wind, which had been gathering in 
strength all that day, fanned the flame; everything was 
dry and ready, and the little shed beyond Rumbold’s in 
which the local Fire Brigade kept its manual, was alight 
before the Fishbourne fire hose would be saved from 
disaster. In marvellously little time a great column of 
black smoke, shot with red streamers, rose out of the 
middle of the Hight street, and all Fishbourne was alive 
with excitement. 

Much of the more respectable elements of Fishbourne 
society was in church or chapel ; many, however, had 
been tempted by the blue sky and the hard freshness of 
spring to take walks inland, and there had been the usual 
disappearance of loungers and conversationalists from 
the beach and the back streets when at the hour of six the 
shooting of bolts and the turning of keys had ended the 
British Ramadan, that weekly interlude of drought our 
law imposes. The youth of the place were scattered on 
the beach or playing in back yards, under threat if their 
clothes were dirtied, and the adolescent were disposed 
in pairs among the more secluded corners to be found 
upon the outskirts of the place. Several godless youths, 


MAKING AN END TO THINGS 193 

seasick but fishing steadily, were tossing upon the sea 
in old Tarbold’s, the infidel’s, boat, and the Clamps were 
entertaining cousins from Port Burdock. Such few 
visitors as Fishbourne could boast in the spring were at 
church or on the beach. To all these that column of 
smoke did in a manner address itself. “ Look here ! ” it 
said, “ this, within limits, is your affair ; what are you 
going to do?” 

The three hobbledehoys, had it been a weekday and 
they in working clothes might have felt free to act, but 
the stiffness of black was upon them and they simply 
moved to the corner by Rusper’s to take a better view 
of Mr. Polly beating at the door. The policeman was a 
young, inexpert constable with far too lively a sense of 
the public house. He put his head inside the Private 
Bar to the horror of everyone there. But there was no 
breach of the law, thank Heaven ! “ Polly’s and Rum- 

bold’s on fire ! ” he said, and vanished again. A window 
in the top story over Boomer’s shop opened, and 
Boomer, captain of the Fire Brigade, appeared, staring 
out with a blank expression. Still staring, he began to 
fumble with his collar and tie; manifestly he had to put 
on his uniform. Hinks’ dog, which had been lying on 
the pavement outside Wintershed’s, woke up, and having 
regarded Mr. Polly suspiciously for some time, growled 
nervously and went round the corner into Granville Alley. 
Mr. Polly continued to beat and kick at Rumbold’s door. 

Then the puulic houses began to vomit forth the less 
desirable elements of Fishbourne society, boys and men 
were moved to run and shout, and more windows went 


194 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

up as the stir increased. Tashingford, the chemist, ap- 
peared at his door, in shirt sleeves and an apron, with 
his photographic plate holders in his hand. And then 
like a vision of purpose came Mr. Gambell, the green- 
grocer, running out of Clayford’s Alley and buttoning 
on his jacket as he ran. His great brass fireman’s hel- 
met was on his head, hiding it all but the sharp nose, 
the firm mouth, the intrepid chin. He ran straight to 
the fire station and tried the door, and turned about and 
met the eye of Boomer still at his upper window. “ The 
key ! ” cried Mr. Gambell, “ the key ! ” 

Mr. Boomer made some inaudible explanation about 
his trousers and half a minute. 

“Seen old Rumbold?” cried Mr. Polly approaching 
Mr. Gambell. 

“ Gone over Downford for a walk,” said Mr. Gam- 
bell. “ He told me! But look ’ere! We ’aven’t got the 
key ! ” 

“ Lord ! ” said Mr. Polly, and regarded the china shop 
with open eyes. He knew the old woman must be there 
alone. He went back to the shop front and stood sur- 
veying it in infinite perplexity. The other activities in 
the street did not interest him. A deaf old lady some- 
where upstairs there ! Precious moments fassing ! Sud- 
denly he was struck by an idea and vanished from pub- 
lic vision into the open door of the Royal Fishboume 
Tap. 

And no^ the street was getting crowded and people 
were laying their hands to this and that. 

Mr. Rusper had been at home reading a number of 


MAKING AN END TO THINGS 195 

tracts upon Tariff Reform, during the quiet of his wife’s 
absence in church, and trying to work out the applica- 
tion of the whole question to ironmongery. He heard a 
clattering in the street and for a time disregarded it, 
until a cry of Fire! drew him to the window. He 
pencilled-marked the tract of Chiozza Money’s that he 
was reading side by side with one by Mr. Holt School- 
ing, made a hasty note “ Bal. of Trade say 12,000,000 ” 
and went to look out. Instantly he opened the window 
he ceased to believe the Fiscal Question the most urgent 
of human affairs. 

“ Good (kik) Gud ! ” said Mr. Rusper. 

For now the the rapidly spreading blaze had forced 
the partition into Mr. Rumbold’s premises, swept across 
his cellar, clambered his garden wall by means of his 
well-tarred mushroom shed, and assailed the engine 
house. It stayed not to consume, but ran as a thing that 
seeks a qarry. Polly’s shop and upper parts were al- 
ready a furnace, and black smoke was coming out of 
Rumbold’s cellar gratings. The fire in the engine house 
showed only as a sudden rush of smoke from the back, 
like something suddenly blown up. The fire brigade, 
still much under strength, were now hard at work in the 
front of the latter building, they had got the door open 
all too late, they had rescued the fire escape and some 
buckets, and were now lugging out their manual, with 
the hose already a dripping mass of molten, flaring, 
stinking rubber. Boomer was dancing about and swear- 
ing and shouting; this direct attack upon his apparatus 
outraged his sense of chivalry. The rest of the brigade 


196 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

hovered in a disheartened state about the rescued fire 
escape, and tried to piece Boomer’s comments into some 
tangible instructions. 

“ Hi ! ” said Rusper from the window. “ Kik ! What’s 
up?” 

Gambell answered him out of his helmet. “ Hose ! ” 
he cried. “ Hose gone ! ” 

“ I (kik) got hose! ” cried Rusper. 

He had. He had a stock of several thousand feet 
of garden hose, of various qualities and calibres, and now 
he felt was the time to use it. In another moment his 
shop door was open and he was hurling pails, garden 
syringes, and rolls of garden hose out upon the pave- 
ment. “(Kik),” he cried, “Undo it! ” to the gathering 
crowd in the roadway. 

They did. Presently a hundred ready hands were 
unrolling and spreading and tangling up and twisting 
and hopelessly involving Mr. Rusper’s stock of hose, 
sustained by an unquenchable assurance that presently 
it would in some manner contain and convey water, and 
Mr. Rusper, on his knees, kicking violently, became in- 
credibly busy with wire and brass junctions and all 
sorts of mysteries. 

“Fix it to the (kik) bathroom tap!” said Mr. 
Rusper. 

Next door to the Fire Station was Mantell and Trob- 
son’s, the little Fishbourne branch of that celebrated 
firm, and Mr. Boomer, seeking in a teeming mind for a 
plan of action, had determined to save this building. 
“ Someone telephone to the Port Burdock and Hamp- 


MAKING AN END TO THINGS 


19 7 


stead-on-Sea fire brigades,” he cried to the crowd and 
then to his fellows : “ Cut away the woodwork of the 
Fire Station ! ” and so led the way into the blaze with 
a whirling hatchet that effected wonders in no time in 
ventilation. 

But it was not, after all, such a bad idea of his. 
Mantell and Throbsou’s wes separated from the fire 
station in front by a covered glass passage, and at the 
back the roof of a big outhouse sloped down to the fire 
station leads. The sturdy longeshoremen, who made up 
the bulk of the fire brigade, assailed the glass roof of the 
passage with extraordinary gusto, and made a smashing 
of glass that drowned for a time the rising uproar of 
the flames. 

A number of willing volunteers started off to the 
new telephone office in obedience to Mr. Boomer’s re- 
quest, only to be told with cold official politeness by the 
young lady at the exchange that all that had been done 
on her own initiative ten minutes ago. She parleyed 
with these heated enthusiasts for a space, and then re- 
turned to the window. 

And indeed the spectacle was well worth looking at. 
The dusk was falling, and the flames were showing bril- 
liantly at half a dozen points. The Royal Fishbourne 
Hotel Tap, which adjoined Mr. Polly to the west was 
being wet by the enthusiastic efforts of a string of vol- 
unteers with buckets of water, and above at a bathroom 
window the little German waiter was busy with the garden 
hose. But Mr. Polly’s establishment looked more like 
a house afire than most houses on fire contrive to look 


i 9 8 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

from start to finish. Every window showed eager flick- 
ering flames, and flames like serpents’ tongues were lick- 
ing out of three large holes in the roof, which was 
already beginning to fall in. Behind, larger and abun- 
dantly spark-shot gusts of fire rose from the fodder that 
was now getting alight in the Royal Fishbourne Hotel 
stables. Next door to Mr. Polly, Mr. Rumbold’s house 
was disgorging black smoke from the gratings that pro- 
tected its underground windows, and smoke and occa- 
sional shivers of flame were also coming out of its 
first-floor windows. The fire station was better alight 
at the back than in front, and its woodwork burnt pretty 
briskly with peculiar greenish bickerings, and a pungent 
flavour. In the street an inaggressively disorderly 
crowd clambered over the rescued fire escape and resisted 
the attempts of the three local constables to get it away 
from the danger of Mr. Polly’s tottering faqade, a clus- 
ter of busy forms danced and shouted and advised on the 
noisy and smashing attempt to cut off Mantell and 
Throbson’s from the fire station that was still in unef- 
fectual progress. Further a number of people appeared 
to be destroying interminable red and grey snakes un- 
der the heated direction of Mr. Rusper, it was as if the 
High Street had a plague of worms, and beyond again 
the more timid and less active crowded in front of an 
accumulation of arrested traffic. Most of the men were 
in Sabbatical black, and this and the white and starched 
quality of the women and children in their best clothes 
gave a note of ceremony to the whole affair. 

For a moment the attention of the telephone cierk 


MAKING AN END TO THINGS 


199 


was held by the activities of Mr. Tashingford, the chem- 
ist, who, regardless of everyone else, was rushing across 
the road hurling fire grenades into the fire station and 
running back for more, and then her eyes lifted to the 
slanting outhouse roof that went up to a ridge behind 
the parapet of Mantell and Throbson’s. An expression 
of incredulity came into the telephone operator’s eyes 
and gave place to hard activity. She flung up the win- 
dow and screamed out: “Two people on the roof up 
there ! Two people on the roof ! ” 

IV 

Her eyes had not deceived her. Two figures which 
had emerged from the upper staircase window of Mr. 
Rumbold’s and had got after a perilous paddle in his 
cistern, on to the fire station, were now slowly but reso- 
lutely clambering up the outhouse roof towards the back 
of the main premises of Messrs. Mantell and Throbson’s. 
They clambered slowly and one urged and helped the 
other, sliping and pausing ever and again, amidst a con- 
stant trickle of fragments of broken tile. 

One was Mr. Polly, with his hair wildly disordered, 
his face covered with black smudges and streaked with 
perspiration, and his trouser legs scorched and blackened ; 
the other was an elderly lady, quietly but becomingly 
dressed in black, with small white frills at her neck and 
wrists and a Sunday cap of ecru lace enlivened with 
a black velvet bow. Her hair was brushed back from 
her wrinkled brow and plastered down tightly, meeting 


200 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


in a small knob behind, her wrinkled mouth bore that 
expression of supreme resolution common with the 
toothless aged. She was shaky not with fear, but with 
the vibrations natural to her years, and she spoke with 
the slow quavering firmness of the very aged. 

“ I don’t mind scrambling,” she said with piping inflex- 
ibility, “but I can’t jump and I wunt jump.” 

“ Scramble, old lady, then — scramble ! ” said Mr. Polly, 
pulling her arm. “ It’s one up and two down on these 
blessed tiles.” 

“ It’s not what I’m used to,” she said. 

“ Stick to it ! ” said Mr. Polly, “ live and learn,” and 
got to the ridge and grasped at her arm to pull her after 
him. 

“ I can’t jump, mind ye,” she repeated, pressing her 
lips together. “ And old ladies like me mustn't be 
hurried.” 

“ Well, let’s get as high as possible anyhow ! ” said 
Mr. Polly, urging her gently upward. “ Shinning up 
a water-spout in your line? Near as you’ll get to 
Heaven.” 

“ I can't jump,” she said. “ I can do anything but 
jump.” 

“ Hold on ! ” said Mr. Polly, “ while I give you a boost. 
That’s — wonderful.” 

“ So long as it isn’t jumping. . . .” 

The old lady grasped the parapet above, and there 
was a moment of intense struggle. 

“ Urup ! ” said Mr. Polly. “ Hold on ! Gollys ! 
where’s she gone to? . . .” 


MAKING AN END TO THINGS 


201 


Then an ill-mended, wavering, yet very reassuring 
spring side boot appeared for an instant. 

“ Thought perhaps there wasn’t any roof there ! ” he 
explained, scrambling up over the parapet beside her. 

“ I’ve never been out on a roof before,” said the old 
lady. “ I’m all disconnected. It’s very bumpy. Espe^ 
dally that last bit. Can’t we sit here for a bit and 
rest? I’m not the girl I useto be.” 

“ You sit here ten minutes,” shouted Mr. Polly, “ and 
you’ll pop like a roast chestnut. Don’t understand me? 
Roast chestnut! roast chestnut! Pop! There ought 
to be a limit to deafness. Come on round to the front 
and see if we can find an attic window. Look at this 
smoke ! ” 

“Nasty!” said the old lady, her eyes following his 
gesture, puckering her face into an expression of great 
distaste. 

“ Come on ! ” 

“ Can’t hear a word you say.” 

He pulled her arm. “ Come on ! ” 

She paused for a moment to relieve herself of a series 
of entirely unexpected chuckles. Sich goings on ! ” she 
said, “ I never did ! Where’s he going now ? ” and came 
along behind the parapet to the front of the drapery 
establishment. 

Below, the street was now fully alive to their pres- 
ence, and encouraged the appearance of their heads by 
shouts and cheers. A sort of free fight was going on 
round the fire, escape, order represented by Mr. Boomer 
and the very young policeman, and disorder by some par- 


202 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


tially intoxicated volunteers with views of their own 
about the manipulation of the apparatus. Two or three 
lengths of Mr. Rusper’s garden hose appeared to have 
twined themselves round the ladder. Mr. Polly watched 
the struggle with a certain impatience, and glanced ever 
and again over his shoulder at the increasing volume 
of smoke and steam that was pouring up from the 
burning fire station. He decided to break an attic win- 
dow and get in, and so try and get down through the 
shop. He found himself in a little bedroom, and re- 
turned to fetch his charge. For some time he could 
not make her understand his purpose. 

“ Got to come at once ! ” he shouted. 

“ I hain’t ’ad sich a time for years ! ” said the old 
lady. 

“ We’ll have to get down through the house ! ” 

“ Can’t do no jumpin’,” said the old lady. ‘ No ! ” 

She yielded reluctantly to his grasp. 

She stared over the parapet. “ Runnin’ and scurry- 
ing about like black beetles in a kitchin,” she said. 

“ We’ve got to hurry.” 

“ Mr. Rumbold ’E’s a very Quiet man. ’E likes every- 
thing Quiet. He’ll be surprised to see me ’ere! Why! 
* — there ’e is ! ” She fumbled in her garments mysteri- 
ously and at last produced a wrinkled pocket handker- 
chief and began to wave it. 

“ Oh, come on ! ” cried Mr. Polly and seized her. 

He got her into the attic, but the staircaise, he found, 
was full of suffocating smoke, and he dared not venture 
below the next floor. He took her into a long dormi- 


MAKING AN END TO THINGS 


203 


tory, shut the door on those pungjent and pervasive 
fumes, and opened the window to discover the fire escape 
was now against the house, and all Fishbourne boiling 
with excitement as an immensely helmeted and active and 
resolute little figure ascended. In another moment the 
rescuer stared over the window sill, heroic, but just a 
trifle self-conscious and grotesque. 

“ Lawks a mussy ! ” said the old lady “ Wonders and 
Wonders! Why! it’s Mr. Gambell! Tding ’is ’ed in 
that thing ! I never did ! ” 

“Can we get her out?” said Mr. Gambell. “There’s 
not much time.” 

“ He might git stuck in it.” 

“ You’ll get stuck (in it,” said Mr. Polly, " come 
along ! ” 

“ Not for jumpin’ I don’t,” said the old lady, under- 
standing his gestures rather than his words. “ Not a bit 
of it. I bain’t no good at jumping and I wunt.” 

They urged her gently but firmly towards the window. 

“ You lemme do it my own way,” said the old lady 
at the sill. . . . 

“ I could do it better if ’e’d take it off.” 

“ Oh ! carm on ! ” 

“ It’s wuss than Carter’s stile,” she said, “ before they 
mended it. With a cow a-looking at you.” 

Mr. Gambell hovered protectingly below. Mr. Polly 
steered her aged limbs from above. An anxious crowd 
below babbled advice and did its best to upset the fire 
escape. Within, streamers of black smoke were pouring 
up through the cracks in the floor. For some seconds 


204 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


the world waited while the old lady gave herself up to 
reckless mirth again. “ Sich times ! ” she said, and 
“Poor Rumbold!” 

Slowly they descended, and Mr. Polly remained at the 
post of danger steadying the long ladder until the old 
lady was in safety below and sheltered by Mr. Rum- 
bold (who was in tears) and the young policeman from 
the urgent congratulations of the crowd. The crowd 
was full of an impotent passion to participate. Those 
nearest wanted to shake her hand, those remoter cheered. 

“ The fust fire I was ever in and likely to be my last. 
It’s a scurryin’, ’un-yin’ business, but I’m real glad I 
haven’t missed it,” said the old lady as she was borne 
rather than led towards the refuge of the Temperance 
Hotel. 

Also she was heard to remark : “ ’E was saying some- 
thing about ’ot^ chestnuts. I ’aven’t ’ad no ’ot chestnuts.” 

Then the crowd became aware of Mr. Polly awkwardly 
negotiating the top rungs of the fire escape. “ ’Ehe ’e 
comes ! ” cride a voice, and Mr. Polly descended into the 
world again out of the conflagration he had lit to be his 
funeral pyre, moist, excited, and tremendously alive, 
amidst a tempest of applause. As he got lower and 
lower the crowd howled like a pack of dogs at him. 
Impatient men unable to wait for him seized and shook 
his descending boots, and so brought him to earth with 
a run. He was rescued with difficulty from an enthu- 
siast who wished to slake at his own expense and to his 
own accompaniment a thirst altogether heroic. He was 


MAKING AN END TO THINGS 


205 


hauled into the Temperance Hotel and flung like a 
sack, breathless and helpless, into the tear-wet embrace 
of Miriam. 


V 

With the dusk and the arrival of some county con- 
stabulary, and first one and presently two other fire en- 
gines from Port Burdock and Hampstead-on-Sea, the 
local talent of Fishbourne found itself forced back into 
a secondary, less responsible and more observant role. 
I will not pursue the story of the fire to its ashes, nor 
will I do more than glance at the unfortunate Mr. Rus- 
per, a modern Laocoon, vainly trying to retrieve his 
scattered hose amidst the tramplings and rushings of 
the Port Burdock experts. 

In a small sitting-room of the Fishbourne Temperance 
Hotel a little group of Fishbourne tradesmen sat and 
conversed in fragments and anon went to the window 
and looked out upon the smoking desolation of their 
homes across the way, and anon sat down again. They 
and their families were the guests of old Lady Bar- 
grave, who had displayed the utmost sympathy and inter- 
est in their misfortunes. She had taken several people 
into her own house at Everdean, had engaged the Tem- 
perance Hotel as a temporary refuge, and personally 
sueprintended the housing of Mantell and Throbson’s 
homeless assistants. The Temperance Hotel became 
and remained extremely noisy and congested, with peo- 
ple sitting about anywhere, conversing in fragments and 
totally unable to get themselves to bed. The manager 


2o6 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

was an old soldier, and following the best traditions of 
the service saw that everyone had hot cocoa. Hot cocoa 
seemed to be about everywhere, and it was no doubt very 
heartening and sustaining to everyone. When the man- 
ager detected anyone disposed to be drooping or pensive 
he exhorted that person at once to drink further hot 
cocoa and maintain a stout heart. 

The hero of the occasion, the centre of interest, was 
Mr. Polly. For he had not only caused the fire by up- 
setting a lighted lamp, scorching his trousers and nar- 
rowly escaping death, as indeed he had now explained 
in detail about twenty times, but he had further thought 
at once of that amiable but helpless old lady next door, 
had shown the utmost decision in making his way to 
her over the yard wall of the Royal Fishbourne Hotel, 
and had rescued her with persistence and vigour in sp r te 
of the levity natural to her years. Everyone thought well 
of him and was anxious to show it, more especially by 
shaking his hand painfully and repeatedly. Mr. Rum- 
bold, breaking a silence of nearly fifteen years, thanked 
him profusely, said he had never understood him prop- 
erly and declared he ought to have a medal. There 
seemed to be a widely diffused idea that Mr. Polly ought 
to have a medal. Hinks thought so. He declared, more- 
over, and with the utmost emphasis that Mr. Polly had 
a crowded and richly decorated interior — or words to 
that effect. There was something apologetic in this per- 
sistence ; it was as if he regretted past intimations that 
Mr. Polly was internally defective and hollow. He also 
said that Mr. Polly was a “ white man,” albeit as he 


MAKING AN END TO THINGS 


207 

developed it, with a liver of the deepest chromatic satis- 
factions. 

Mr. Polly wandered centrally through it all, with his 
face ashed and his hair carefully brushed and parted, 
looking modest and more than a little absent-minded, 
and wearing a pair of black dress trousers belonging to 
the manager of the Temperance Hotel, — a larger man 
than himself in every way. 

Pie drifted upstairs to his fellow-tradesmen, and stood 
for a time staring into the littered street, with its pools 
of water and extinguished gas lamps. His companions 
in misfortune resumed a fragmentary disconnected con- 
versation. They touched now on one aspect of the dis- 
aster and now on another, and there were intervals of 
silence. More or less empty cocoa cups were distributed 
over the table, mantel shelf and piano, and in the middle 
of the table was a tin of biscuits, into which Mr. Rum- 
bold, sitting round-shoulderedly, dipped ever and again 
in an absent-minded way, and munched like a distant 
shooting of coals. It added to the solemnity of the affair 
that nearly all of them were in their black Sunday clothes, 
little Clamp was particularly impressive and dignified 
in a wide open frock coat, a Gladstone shaped paper 
collar, and a large white and blue tie. They felt that 
they were in the presence of a great disaster, the sort of 
disaster that gets into the papers, and is even illus- 
trated by blurred photographs of the crumbling ruins. 
In the presence of that sort of disaster all honourable 
men are lugubrious and sententious. 

And yet it is impossible to deny a certain element of 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


208 

elation. Not one of those excellent men but was already 
realising that a great door had opened as it were in the 
opaque fabric of destiny, that they were to get their 
money again that had seemed sunken for ever beyond 
any hope in the deeps of retail trade. Life was already 
in their imagination rising like a Phoenix from the 
flames. 

“I suppose there’ll b,e a public subscription,” said 
Mr. Clamp. 

“ Not for those who’r insured,” said Mr. Wintershed. 

“ I was thinking of them assistants from Mantell and 
Throbson’s. They must have lost nearly everything.” 

“ They’ll be looked after all right,” said Mr. Rum- 
bold. “ Never fear.” 

Pause. 

" Tm ■ insured,” said Mr. Clamp, with unconcealed 
satisfaction. “ Royal Salamander.” 

“ Same here,” said Mr. Wintershed. 

“ Mine’s the Glasgow Sun,” Mr. Hink)s remarked. 
“ Very good company.” 

“ You insured, Mr. Polly?” 

‘ He deserves to be,” said Rumbold. 

“ Ra-ther,” said Hinks. “ Blowed if he don’t. Hard 
lines it would be — if there wasn’t something for him.” 

“ Commercial and General,” answered Mr. Polly over 
his shoulder, still staring out of the window. “ Oh ! 
Pm all right.” 

The topic dropped for a time, though manifestly it con- 
tinued to exercise their minds. 


MAKING AN END TO THINGS 


209 

“ It’s cleared me out of a lot of old stock/’ said Mr. 
Wintershed ; “ that’s one good thing.” 

The remark was felt to be in rather questionable taste, 
and still more so was his next comment. 

“ Rusper’s a bit sick it didn’t reach ’im.” 

Everyone looked uncomfortable, and no one was will- 
ing to point the reason why Rusper should be a bit sick. 

“ Rusper’s been playing a game of his own,” said 
Hinks. “ Wonder what he thought he was up to ! Sit- 
tin’ in the middle of the road with a pair of tweezers 
he was, and about a yard of wire — mending somethin’. 
Wonder he wam’t run over by the Port Burdock en- 
gine.” 

Presently a little chat sprang up upon the causes of 
fires, and Mr. Polly was moved to tell how it had hap- 
pened for the one and twentieth time. His story had 
now become as circumstantial and exact as the evidence 
of a police witness. “ Upset the lamp,” he said. “ I’d 
just lighted it, I was going upstairs, and my foot slipped 
against where one of the treads was a bit rotten, and 
down I went. Thing was aflare in a moment! . . .” 

He yawned at the end of the discussion, and moved 
doorward. 

“ So long,” said Mr. Polly. 

“ Good night,” said Mr. Rumbold. “ You played a 
brave man’s part! If you don’t get a medal ” 

He left an eloquent pause. 

“ ’Ear, ’ear ! ” said Mr. Wintershed and Mr. Clamp. 
“ Goo’night, O’ man,” said Mr. Hinks. 

“ Goo’night All,” said Mr. Polly . . . 


210 


THE HISTORY OF MR . POLLY 


He went slowly upstairs. The vague perplexity com- 
mon to popular heroes pervaded his mind. He entered 
the bedroom and turned up the electric light. It was 
quite a pleasant room, one of the best in the Temperance 
Hotel, with a nice clean flowered wallpaper, and a very 
large looking-glass. Miriam appeared to be asleep, and 
her shoulders were humped up under the clothes in a 
shapeless, forbidding lump that Mr. Polly had found ut- 
terly loathsome for fifteen years. He went softly over 
to the dressing-table and surveying himself thoughtfully. 
Presently he hitched up the trousers. “ Miles too big 
for me,” he remarked. “ Funny not to have a pair of 
breeches of one’s own. . . . Like being born again. 

Naked came I into the world. . . 

Miriam stirred and rolled over, and stared at him. 

“ Hello!” she said. 

“ Hello.” 

“ Come to bed ? ” 

“ It’s three.” 

Pause while Mr. Polly disrobed slowly. 

“ I been thinking,” said Miriam. “ It isn’t going to 
be so bad after all. We shall get your insurance. We 
can easy begin all over again.” 

“ H’m,” said Mr. Polly. 

She turned her face away from him and reflected. 

“ Get a better house,” said Miriam, regarding the 
wallpaper pattern. “I’ve always ’ated them stairs.” 

Mr. Polly removed a boot. 

“ Choose a better position where there’s more doing,” 
murmured Miriam. . . . 


MAKING AN END TO THINGS 


211 


“ Not half so bad,” she whispered. . . . 

“ You wanted stirring up,” she said, half asleep. . . . 

It dawned upon Mr. Polly for the first time that he 
had forgotten something. 

He ought to have cut his throat! 

The fact struck him as, remarkable, but as now no 
longer any particular urgency. It seemed a thing far 
off in the past, and he wondered why he had not thought 
of it before. Odd thing life is ! If he had done it he 
would never have seen this clean and agreeable apart- 
ment with the electric light. . . . His thoughts wan- 

dered into a question of detail. Where could he have 
put the razor down? Somewhere in the little room be- 
hind the shop he supposed, but he could not think where 
more precisely. Anyhow it didn’t matter now. 

He undressed himself calmly, got into bed, and fell 
asleep almost immediately. 


CHAPTER THE NINTH 


THE POTWELL INN 

I 

B UT when a man has once broken through the 
paper walls of everyday circumstance, those un- 
substantial walls that hold so many of us securely 
prisoned from the cradle to the grave, he has made a 
discovery. If the world does not please you you can 
change it. Determine to alter it at any price, and you 
can change it altogether. You may change it to some- 
thing sinister and angry, to something appalling, but 
it may be you will change it to something brighter, some- 
thing more agreeable, and at the worst something much 
more interesting. There is only one sort of man who is 
absolutely to blame for his own misery, and that is the 
man who finds life dull and dreary. There are no cir- 
cumstances in the world that determined action cannot 
alter, unless perhaps they are the walls of a prison cell, 
and even those will dissolve and change, I am told, into 
the infirmary compartment at any rate, for the man who 
can fast with resolution. I give these things as facts 
and information, and with no moral intimations. And 
Mr. Polly lying awake at nights, with a renewed indi- 
gestion, with Miriam sleeping sonorously beside him and 


212 


THE POTWELL INN 


213 


a general air of inevitableness about his situation, saw 
through it, understood there was no inevitable any more, 
and escaped his former despair. 

He could for example, “ clear out.” 

It became a wonderful and alluring phrase to him : 
“ clear out ! ” 

Why had he never thought of clearing out before? 

He was amazed and a little shocked at the unimagina- 
tive and superfluous criminality in him that had turned 
old cramped and stagnant Fishbourne into a blaze and 
new beginnings. (I wish from the bottom of my heart 
I could add that he was properly sorry.) But something 
constricting and restrained seemed to have been de- 
stroyed by that flare. Fishbourne wasn’t the world. 
That was the new, the essential fact of which he had 
lived so lamentably in ignorance. Fishbourne as he had 
known it and hated it, so that he wanted to kill himself 
to get out of it, wasn’t the world. 

The insurance money he was to receive made every- 
thing humane and kindly and practicable. He would 
“ clear out,” 'with justice and humaniljy. He would 
take exactly twenty-one pounds, and all the rest he would 
leave to Miriam. That seemed to him absolutely fair. 
Without him, she could do all sorts of things — all the 
sorts of things she was constantly urging him to do. 

And he would go off along the white road that led 
to Garchester, and on to Crogate and so to Tunbridge 
Wells, where there was a Toad Rock he had heard of, 
but never seen. (It seemed to him this must needs be 
a marvel.) And so to other towns and cities. He would 


214 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


walk and loiter by the way, and sleep in inns at night, 
and get an odd job here and there and talk to strange 
people. Perhaps he would get quite a lot of work and 
prosper, and if he did not do so he would lie down in 
front of £ train, or wait for a warm night, and then 
fall into some smooth, broad river. Not so bad as sit- 
ting down to a dentist, not nearly so bad. And he would 
never open a shop any more. Never! 

So the possibilities of the future presented themselves 
to Mr. Polly as he lay awake at nights. 

It was springtime, and in the woods so soon as one 
got out of reach of the sea wind there would be anemones 
and primroses. 

II 

A month later a leisurely and dusty tramp, plump 
equatorially and slightly bald, with his hands in his 
pockets and his lips puckered to a contemplative whistle, 
strolled along the river bank between Uppingdon and 
Potwell. It was a profusely budding spring day and 
greens such as God had never permitted in the world 
before in human memory (though indeed they come every 
year), were mirrored vividly in a mirror of equally un- 
precedented brown. For a time the wanderer stopped 
and stood still, and even the thin whistle died away from 
his lips as he watched a water vole run to and fro upon 
a little headland across the stream. The vole plopped 
into the water and swam and dived and only when the last 
ring of its disturbance had vanished did Mr. Polly re- 
sume his thoughtful course to nowhere in particular. 


THE POTWELL INN 


215 


For the first time in many years he had been leading 
a healthy human life, living constantly in the open air, 
walking every day for eight or nine hours, eating spar- 
ingly, % accepting every conversational opportunity, not 
even disdaining the discussion of possible work. And 
beyond mending a hole in his coat that he had made 
while negotiating barbed wire, with a borrowed needle 
and thread in a lodging house, he had done no work at 
all. Neither had he worried about business nor about 
time and seasons. And for the first time in his life he 
had seen the Aurora Borealis. 

So far the holiday had cost him very little. He had 
arranged it on a plan that was entirely his own. He had 
started with four five-pound notes and a pound divided 
into silver, and he had gone by train from Fishbourne to 
Ashington. At Ashington he had gone to the post- 
office, obtained a registered letter, and sent his four five- 
pound notes with a short brotherly note addressed to 
himself at Gilhampton Post-office. He sent this letter 
to Gilhampton for no other reason in the world than that 
he liked the name of Gilhampton and the rural sugges- 
tion of its containing county, which was Sussex, and 
having so dispatched it, he set himself to discover, mark 
down and walk to Gilhampton, and so recover his re- 
sources. And having got to Gilhampton at last, he 
changed his five-pound note, bought four pound postal 
orders, and repeated his manoeuvre with nineteen pounds. 

After a lapse of fifteen years he rediscovered this in- 
teresting world, about which so many people go incredi- 
bly blind and bored. He went along country roads 


2l6 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


while all the birds were piping and chirruping and cheep- 
ing and singing, and looked at fresh new things, and 
felt as happy and irresponsible as a boy with an unex- 
pected half-holiday. And if ever the thought of Miriam 
returned to him he controlled his mind. He came to 
country inns and sat for unmeasured hours talking of 
this and that to those sage carters who rest for ever in 
the taps of country inns, while the big sleek brass jingling 
horses wait patiently outside with their waggons; he 
got a job with some van people who were wandering 
about the country with swings and a steam roundabout 
and remained with them for three days, until one of their 
dogs took a violent dislike to him and made his duties 
unpleasant; he talked to tramps and wayside labourers, 
he snoozed under hedges by day and in outhouses and 
hayricks at night, and once, but only once, he slept 
in a casual ward. He felt as the etiolated grass and 
daisies must do when you move the garden roller away 
to a new place. 

He gathered a quantity of strange and interesting 
memories. 

He crossed some misty meadows by moonlight and the 
mist lay low on the grass, so low that it scarcely reached 
above his waist, and houses and clumps of trees stood 
out like islands in a milky sea, so sharply defined was the 
upper surface of the mistbank. He came nearer and 
nearer to a strange thing that floated like a boat upon 
this magic lake, and beheld something moved at the 
stern and a rope was whisked at the prow, and it had 
changed into a pensive cow, drowsy-eyed, regarding him. 


THE POTWELL INN 


21 7 


He saw a remarkable sunset in a new valley near 
Maidstone, a very red and clear sunset, a wide redness 
under a pale cloudless heaven, and with the hills all 
round the edge of the sky a deep purple blue and clear 
and flat, looking exactly as he had seen mountains 
painted in pictures. He seemed transported to some 
strange country, and would have felt no surprise if the 
old labourer he came upon leaning silently over a gate 
had addressed him in an unfamiliar tongue. . . . 

Then one night, just towards dawn, his sleep upon a 
pile of brushwood was broken by the distant rattle of a 
racing motor car breaking all the speed regulations, and 
as he could not sleep again, he got up and walked into 
Maidstone as the day came. He had never been abroad 
in a town at half-past two in his life before, and the 
stillness of everything in the bright sunrise impressed 
him profoundly. At one corner was a startling police- 
man, standing in a doorway quite motionless, like a 
waxen image. Mr. Polly wished him “ good morning ” 
unanswered, and went down to the bridge over the 
Medway and sat on the parapet very still and thought- 
ful, watching the town awaken, and wondering what he 
should do if it didn’t, if the world of men never woke 
again. . . . 

One day he found himself going along a road, with a 
wide space of sprouting bracken and occasional trees on 
either side, and suddenly this road became strangely, 
perplexingly familiar. “Lord!” he said, and turned 
about and stood. “ It can’t be.” 

He was incredulous, then left the road and walked 


2l8 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


along a scarcely perceptible track to the left, and came in 
half a minute to an old lichenous stone wall. It seemed 
exactly the bit of wall he had known so well. It might 
have been but yesterday he was in that place; there 
remained even a little pile of wood. It became absurdly 
the same wood. The bracken perhaps was not so high, 
and most of its fronds still uncoiled ; that was all. Here 
he had stood, it seemed, and there she ;had sat and 
looked down upon him. Where was she now, and what 
had become of her? He counted the years back and 
marvelled that beauty should have called to him with 
so imperious a voice and signified nothing. 

He hoisted himself with some little difficulty to the 
top of the wall, and saw off under the beech trees two 
schoolgirls — small, insignificant, pig-tailed creatures, 
with heads of blond and black, with their arms twined 
about each other’s necks, no doubt telling each other 
the silliest secrets. 

But that girl with the red hair — was she a countess? 
was she a queen? Children perhaps? Had sorrow 
dared to touch her? 

Had she forgotten altogether? . . . 

A tramp sat by the roadside thinking, and it seemed 
to the man in the passing motor car he must needs be 
plotting for another pot of beer. But as a matter of 
fact what the tramp was saying to himself over and over 
again was a variant upon a well-known Hebrew word. 

“ Itckabod,” the tramp was saying in the voice of one 
who reasons on the side of the inevitable. “ It’s Fair 
Itchabod, O’ Man. There’s no going back to it.” 


THE POTWELL INN 


219 


III 

It was about two o’clock in the afternoon one hot 
day in hig^h May when Mr. Polly, unhurrying and 
serene, came to that broad bend of the river to which the 
little lawn and garden of the Potwell Inn run down. 
He stopped at the sight of the place with its deep tiled 
roof, nestling under big trees — you never get a decently 
big, decently shaped tree by the seaside — its sign to- 
wards the roadway, its sun-blistered green bnch and 
tables, its shapely white windows and its row of unshoot- 
ing hollyhock plants in, the garden. A hedge separaed it 
from a butter cup-yellow meadow, and beyond stood 
three poplars in a group against the sky, three excep- 
tionally tall, graceful and harmonious poplars. It is 
hard to say what there was about them that made them 
so beautiful to Mr. Polly; but they seemed to him to 
touch a pleasant scene to a distinction almost divine. He 
remained admiring them for a long time. At last the 
need for coarser aesthetic satisfactions arose in his. 

“ Provinder,” he whispered, drawing near o the Inn. 
“ Cold sirlion for choice. And nut-brown) brew and 
wheatten bread.” 

The nearer he came to the place the more he liked it. 
The windows on the ground floor were long and low, 
and they had pleasing red blinds. The green tables 
outside were agreeably ringed with memories of former 
drinks, and an extensive grape vine spread level branches 
across the whole front of the place. Against the wall 


220 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


was a broken oar, two boat-hooks and the stained and 
faded red cushions of a pleasure boat. One went up 
three steps to the glass-panelled door and peeped into 
a broad, low room with a bar and beer engine, behind 
which were many bright and helpful looking bottles 
against mirrors, and great and little pewter measures, 
and bottles fastened in brass wire upside down with their 
corks replaced by taps, and a white china cask labelled 
“ Shrub,” and cigar boxes and boxes of cigarettes, and 
a couple of Toby jugs and a beautifully coloured hunting 
scene framed and glazed, showing the most elegant and 
beautiful people taking Piper’s Cherry Brandy, and cards 
such as the law requires about the dilution of spirits and 
the illegality of bringing children into bars, and satirical 
verses about swearing and asking for credit, and three 
very bright red-cheeked wax apples and a round-shaped 
clock. But these were the mere background to the really 
pleasant thing in the spectacle, which was quite the 
plumpest woman Mr. Polly had ever seen, seated in an 
armchair in the midst of all these bottles and glasse 
and glittering things, peacefully and tranquilly and with- 
out the slightest loss of dignity asleep. Many people 
would have called her a fat woman, but Mr. Polly’s in- 
nate sense of epithet told him from the outset that plump 
was the word. She had shapely brows and a straight, 
well-shaped nose, kind lines and contentment about 
her mouth, and beneath it the jolly chins clustered like 
chubby little cherubim about the feet of- an Assumption- 
ing-Madonna. Her plumpness was firm and pink and 
wholesome, and her hands, dimpled at every joint, were 


THE POTWELL INN 


221 


clasped in front of her, she seemed as it were to embrace 
herself with infinite confidence and kindliness as one 
who knew herself good in substance, good in essence, 
and would show her gratitude to God by that ready ac- 
ceptance of all that he had given her. Her head was a 
little on one side, not much, but just enough to speak of 
trustfulness, and rob her of the stiff effect of self-reli- 
ance. And she slept. 

“ My sort,” said Mr. Polly, and opened the door very 
softly, divided between the desire to enter and come 
nearer and an instinctive indisposition to break slumbers 
so manifestly sweet and satisfying. 

She awoke with a start, and it amazed Mr. Polly to 
see swift terror flash into her eyes. Instantly it had 
gone again. 

“ Law ! ” she said, her face softening with relief, “ I 
thought you were Jim.” 

“ Pm never Jim,” said Mr. Polly. 

“ You’ve got his sort of hat.” 

“ Ah ! ” said Mr. Polly, and leant over the bar. 

“ It just came into my head you was Jim,” said the 
plump lady, dismissed the topic and stood up. “ I be- 
lieve I was having forty winks,” she said, “ if all the 
truth was told. What can I do for you ? ” 

“ Cold meat?” said Mr. Polly. 

“ There is cold meat,” the plump woman admitted. 

“ And room for it.” 

The plump woman came and leant over the bar and 
regarded him judicially, but kindly. “ There’s some cold 


222 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

boiled beef,” she said, and added : “ A bit of crisp let- 
tuce?” 

“ New mustard,” said Mr. Polly. 

“ And a tankard ! ” 

“ A tankard.” 

They understood each other perfectly. 

“ Looking for work ? ” asked the plump woman. 

“ In a way,” said Mr. Polly. 

They smile like old friends. 

Whatever the truth may be about love there is cer- 
tainly such a thing as friendship at first sight. They 
liked each other’s voices, they liked each other’s way of 
smiling and speaking. 

“ It’s such beautiful weather this spring,” said Mr. 
Polly, explaining everything. 

“ What sort of work do you want ? ” she asked. 

“ I’ve never properly thought that out,” 'said Mr. 
Polly. “ I’ve been looking round — for Ideas.” 

“ Will you have your beef in the tap or outside ? 
That’s the tap.” 

Mr. Polly had a glimpse of an oaken settle. “ In the 
tap will be handier for you,” he said. 

“ Hear that ? ” said the plump lady. 

“ Hear what?” 

“ Listen.” 

Presently the silence was broken by a distant howl. 
“ Oooooo-ver ! ” “ Eh ? ” she said. 

He nodded. 

“ That’s the ferry. And there isn’t a ferryman.” 

“ Could I?” 


THE POTWELL INN 


223 


“ Can you punt ? ” 

“ Never tried.” 

“ Well — pull he pole out before you reach the end of 
the punt, that’s all. Try.” 

Mr. Polly went out again into the sunshine. 

At times one can tell so much so briefly. Here are 
the facts then — bare. He found a punt and a pole, got 
across to the steps on the opposite side, picked up an 
elderly gentleman in an alpaca jacket and a pith helmet, 
cruised with him vaguely for twenty minutes, conveyed 
him tortuously into the midst of a thicket of forget- 
me-not spangled sedges, splashed some water-weed over 
him, hit him twice with the punt pole, and finally landed 
him, alarmed but abusive, in treacherous soil at the edge 
of a hay meadow about forty yards down stream, where 
he immediately got into difficulties with a noisy, aggres- 
sive little white dog, which was guardian of a jacket. 

Mr. Polly returned in a complicated manner to his 
moorings. 

He found the plump woman rather flushed and tearful, 
and seated at one of the green tables outside. 

“ I been laughing at you,” $he said. 

“ What for?” asked Mr. Polly. 

“ I ain’t ’ad such a laugh since Jim come ’ome. 
When you ’it ’is ’ed, it ’urt my side.” 

“ It didn’t hurt his head — not particularly.” 

She waved her head. “ Did you charge him any- 
thing?” 

“ Gratis,” said Mr. Polly. “ I never thought of it.” 

The plump woman pressed her hands to her sides and 


224 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


laughed silently for a space. “You ought to have 
charged him sumpthing,” she said. “ You better come 
and have your cold meat, before you do any more puntin’. 
You and me’ll get on together.” 

Presently she came and stood watching him^ eat. 
“ You eat better than you punt,” she said, and then, “ I 
dessay you could learn to punt.” 

“ Wax to receive and marble to retain,” said Mr. Polly. 
“ This eebf is a Bit of All Right, Ma’m. I could have 
done differently if I hadn’t been punting on an empty 
stomach. There’s a tear feeling as the pole goes in — ♦ — ” 
“ I’ve never held with fasting,” said the plump woman. 
“ You want a ferryman? ” 

“ I want an odd man about the place.” 

“ I’m odd, all right. What’s your wages ? ” 

“ Not much, but you get tips and pickings. I’ve a 
sort of feeling it would suit you.” 

“ I’ve a sort of feeling it would. What’s the duties. 
Fetch and carry? Ferry? Garden? Wash bottles. 
Ceteris paribus ?” 

“ That’s about it,” said the fat woman. 

“ Give me a trial.” 

“ I’ve more than half a mind. Or I wouldn’t have 
said anything about it. I suppose you’re all right. 
You’ve got a sort of half-respectable look about you. 
I suppose you ’aven’t done anything.” 

“ Bit of Arson,” said Mr. Polly, as if he jected. 

“ So long as you haven’t the habit,” said the plump 
woman. 

“ My first time, M’am,” said Mr. Polly, munching his 


THE POT WELL INN 


225 

way through an excellent big leaf of lettuce. “ And 
my last.” 

“ It’s all right if you haven’t been to prison,” said the 
plump woman. “ It isn’t what a man happened to do 
makes ’im bad. We all happen to do things at times. 
It’s bringing it home to him, and spoiling his self-respect 
does the mischief. You don’t look a wrong un. “ ’Ave 
you been to prison ? ” 

“ Never.” 

“Nor a reformatory? Nor any institution ? ” 

“Not me. Do I look reformed?” 

“ Can you paint and carpenter a bit ? ” 

“ Well, I’m ripe for it.” 

“ Have a bit of cheese? ” 

“ If I might.” 

And the way she brought the cheese showed Mr. Polly 
that the business was settled in her mind. 

He spent the afternoon exploring the premises of the 
Potwell Inn and learning the duties that might be ex- 
pected of him, such as Stockholm tarring fences, digging 
potatoes, swabbing out boats, helping people land, em- 
barking, landing and time-keeping for the hirers of two 
rowing boats and one Canadian canoe, baling out the 
said vessels and concealing tjieir leaks and defects from 
orosoective hirers, persuading inexperienced hirers to 
start down stream rather than up, repairing rowlocks 
and taking inventories of returning boats with a view to 
supplementary charges, cleaning boots, sweeping chim- 
neys, house-painting, cleaning windows, sweeping out 
and sanding the tap and bar, cleaning pewter, washing 


226 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


glases, turpentining woodwork, whitewashing generally, 
plumbing and engineering, rpearing locks and clocks, 
waitin and tapster’s work gentrally, beating carpets and 
mats, cleaning bottles and saving corks, taking into the 
cellar, moving, tapping and connecting beer casks with 
their engines, blocking and destroying wasps’ nests, doing 
forestry with several trees, drowning superfluous kittens, 
and dog-fancying as required, assisting in the rearing of 
ducklings, and the care of various poultry, bee-keeping, 
stabling, baiting and rooming horses and asses, cleaning 
and “ garging ” motor cars and bicycles, inflating tires 
and repairing punctures, recovering the bodies of 
drowned persons from the river as required, and assisting 
people in trouble in the water, first-aid and sympathy, 
improvising and superintending a bathing station for 
cisitors, attending inquests and funerals in the interests 
of the establishment, scrubbing floors and all the ordinary 
duties o fa scullion, he ferry, chasing hens and goats 
from the adjacent cottages out of the garden, making up 
paths and superintending drainage, gardening generally, 
delivering bottle beer and soda water syphons in the 
neighbourhood, running miscellaneous errands, removing 
drunken and offensive persons from the premises by tact 
or muscle as occasion required, keeping in with the local 
policemen, defending the premises in general and the 
orchard in particular from deprecators. . . . 

“ Can but try it,” said Mr. Polly towards tea time. 
“ When there’s nothing else on hand I suppose I might 
do a bit of fishing.” 


THE POTWELL INN 


227 


III 

Mr. Polly was particularly charmed by the ducklings. 

They were piping about among tfce vegetables in the 
company of their foster mother, and as he and the 
plump woman came down the garden path the little 
creatures mobbed them, and ran over their boots and in 
between Mr. Polly’s legs, and did their best to be trod- 
den upon and killed after the manner of ducklings all 
the world over. Mr. Polly had neve\- been near young 
ducklings before, and their extreme fondness and the 
delicate completeness of their feet an<\ beaks filled him 
with admiration. It is open to question whether there 
is anything more friendly in the world tlkn a very young 
duckling. It was with the utmost difficulty that he tore 
himself away to practise punting, with theblump woman 
coaching from the bank. Punting he fotnd'was diffi- 
cult, but not impossible, and towards fotr o’clock he 
succeeded in conveying a second passenge\ across the 
sundering flood from the inn to the unknowY 

As he returned, slowly indeed, but now \ne might 
almost say surely, to the peg to which the Vint was 
moored, he became aware of a singularly odightful 
human being awaiting him on the bank. She sto>d with 
her legs very wide apart, her hands behind he\back, 
and her head a little on one side, watching his gestures 
with an expression of disdainful interest. She\had 
black hair and brown legs and a buff short frockVnd 


228 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

very intelligent eyes. And when he had .reached a 
sufficient proximity she remarked : “ Hello ! ” 

“ Hello,” said Mr. Polly, and saved himself in the 
nick of time from disaster. 

“ Silly,” said the young lady, and Mr. Polly lunged 
nearer. 

“ What are you called ? ” 

“ Polly.” 

“ Liar!” 

“ Why?” 

“ Ps Polly.” 

“ Then Pm Alfred. But I meant to be Polly.” 

“ I was first.” 

“All right. Tm going to be the ferryman.” 

“ I see. You 11 have to punt better.” 

“ You should have seen me early in the afternoon.” 

“ I can imagine it. . . . Pve seen the others.” 

“ What others ? ” Mr. Polly had landed now and was 
fastening up die punt. 

“ What Lhcle Jim has scooted.” 

“ Scootet ? ” 

“ He ccmes and scoots them. He’ll scott you too I 
expect.” 

A myterious shadow seemed to fall athwart the sun- 
shine aid pleasantness of the Potwell Inn. 

“ Pu not a scooter,” said Mr. Polly. 

“ Tncle Jim is.” 

S’e whistled a little flatly for a moment, and threw 
smdl stones at a clump of meadow-sweet that sprang 
frjm the bank. Then she remarked : 



THE POT WELL INN 


229 

“ When Uncle Jim comes back he’ll cut your insides 
out. . . . P’raphs, very likely, he’ll let me see.” 

There was a pause. 

“Who’s Uncle Jim?” Mr. Polly asked in a faded 
voice. 

“ Don’t you know who Uncle Jim is ! He’ll show you. 
He’s a scorcher, is Uncle Jim. He only came back just 
a little time ago, and he’s scooted three men. He don’t 
like strangers about, don’t Uncle Jim. He can swear. 
He’s going to teach me, soon as I can whissle properly.” 

Teach you to swear!” cried Mr. Polly, horrified. 

“And spit,” said the little girl proudly. “He says 
Pm the gamest little beast he ever came across — ever.” 

For the first time in his life it seemed to Mr. Polly 
that he had come across something sheerly dreadful. He 
stared at the pretty thing of flesh and spirit in front of 
him, lightly balanced on its stout little legs and looking 
at him with eyes that had still to learn the expression of 
either disgust or fear. 

“ I say,” said Mr. Polly. “ How old are you ? ” 

“ Nine,” said the little girl. 

She turned away and reflected. Truth compelled her 
to add one other statement. 

“ He’s not what I should call handsome, not Uncle 
Jim,” she said. “ But he’s a scorcher and no mistake. 

. . . Gramma don’t like him.” 

IV 

Mr. Polly found the plump woman in the big bricked 


230 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

kitchen lighting a fire for tea. He went to the root of 
the matter at once. 

“I say/’ he asked, “who’s Uncle Jim?” 

The plump woman blanched and stood still for a 
moment. A stick fell out of the bundle in her hand un- 
heeded. “ That little granddaughter of mine been say- 
ing things ? ” she asked faintly. 

“ Bits of things,” said Mr. Polly. 

“ Well, I suppose I must tell you sooner or later. 

He’s . It’s Jim. He’s the drorhaok to this place, 

that’s what he is. The Drorback. I hoped you mightn’t 
hear so soon. . . . Very likely he’s gone.” 

“She don’t seem to think so.” 

“ ’E ’asn’t been near the place these two weeks and 
more,” said the plump woman. 

“But who is he?” 

“ I suppose I got to tell you,” said the plump woman. 

“ She says he scoots people,” Mr. Polly remarked after 
a pause. 

“ He’s my own siser’s son.” The plump woman 
watched the crackling fire for a space. “ I suppose I 
got to tell you,” she repeated. 

She softened towards tears. “ I try not to think of 
it, and night and day he’s haunting me. I try not to 
think of it. I’ve been for easy-going all my life. But 
I’m that worried and afraid, with death and ruin threat- 
ened and evil all about me! I don’t know what to do! 
My own sister’s son, and me a widow woman and 
’elpless against his doin’s ! ” 


THE POTWELL INN 


231 


She put down the sticks she held upon the fender, and 
felt for her handkerchief. She began to sob and talk 
quickly. 

“ I wouldn’t mind nothing else half so much if he’d 
leave that child alone. But he goes talking to her — if 
I leave her a moment he’s talking to her, teaching her 
words and giving her ideas ! ” 

“ That’s a Bit Thick,” said Mr. Polly. 

“ Thick ! ” cried the plump woman ; “ it’s ’orrible ! 
And what am I to do? He’s been here three times 
now, six days and a week and a part of a week, and I 
pray to God night and day he may never come again. 
Praying! Back he’s come sure as fate. He takes my 
money and he takes my things. He won’t let no man 
stay here to protect me or do the boats or work the 
ferry. The ferry’s getting a scandal. They stand and 
shout and scream and use language. . . . If I com- 

plain they’ll say I’m helpless to manage here, they’ll take 
away my license, out I shall go — and it’s all the living 
I can get — and he knows it and he plays on it and he 
don’t care. And here I am. I’d send the child away, 
but I got nowhere to send the child. I buys him off when 
it comes to that, and back he comes, worse than ever, 
prowling round and doing evil. And not a soul to help 
me. Not a soul! I just hoped there might be a day 
or so. Before he comes back again. I was just hop- 
ing I’m the sort that hopes.” 

Mr. Polly was reflecting on the flaws and drawbacks 
that seem to be inseparable from all the more agreeable 
things in life. 


232 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


“ Biggish sort of man I expect ? ” asked Mr. Polly, 
trying to get the situation in all its bearings. 

But the plump woman did not heed him. She was 
going on with her fire making, and retailing in discon- 
nected fragments the fearfulness of Uncle Jim. 

“ There was always something a bit wrong with him,” 
she said, “ but nothing you mightn’t have hoped for, not 
till they took him and carried him off and reformed 
him. . . . 

“ He was cruel to the hens and chicking?, it’s true, 
and stuck a knife into another boy, but then I’ve seen 
him that nice to a cat, nobody could have been kinder. 
I’m sure he didn’t do no ’arm to that cat whatever any- 
one tries to make out of it. I’d never listen to that. 
. . . It was that reformatory ruined him. They put 

hi malong of a lot of London boys full of ideas of wicked- 
ness, and because he didn’t mind pain — land he don’t, I 
will admit try as I would — they made him think himself 
a hero. Them boys laughed at the teachers they set over 
them, laughed and mocked at them — and I don’t sup- 
pose they was the best teachers in the world, I don’t 
suppose, and I don’t suppose anyone sensible does sup- 
pose that everyone who goes to be a teacher or a chap- 
lin or a warder in a Reformatory Home gjoes and 
changes right away into an Angel of Grace from Heaven 
— and Oh, Lord ! where was I ? ” 

“ What did they send him to the Reformatory for ? ” 
“ Playing truant and stealing. He stole right enough 
— stole the money from an old woman, and what was 
I to do when it came to the trial but say what I knew. 


THE POTWELL INN 


233 


And him like a viper a-looking at me — more like a viper 
than a human boy. He leans on the bar and looks at 
me. ‘ All right, Aunt Flo,’ he says, just that and nothing 
more. Time after time, I’ve dreamt of it, and now he’s 
come. ‘ They’ve Reformed me,’ he says, ‘ and made me 
a devil, and devil I mean to be to you. So out with it,’ 
he says.” 

“ What did you give him last ‘ time ? ” asked Mr. 
Polly. 

“ Three golden pounds,” said the plump woman. 
“ ‘ That won’t last very long,’ he says. ‘ But there ain’t 
no hurry. I’ll be back in a week about.’ If I wasn’t 
one of the hoping sort ” 

She left the sentence unfinished. 

Mr. Polly reflected. “What sort of a size is he?” 
he asked. “ I’m not one of your Herculaceous sort, if 
you mean that. Nothing very wonderful bicepitally .” 

“ You’ll scoot,” said the plump woman with convic- 
tion, rather than bitterness. “ You’d better scoot now, 
and I’ll try and find some money for him to go away 
again when he comes. It ain’t reasonable to expect you 
to do anything but scoot. But I suppose it’s the way 
of a woman in trouble to try and get help from a 
man, and hope and hope. I’m the hoping sort.” 

“ How long’s he been about ? ” asked Mr. Polly, ignor- 
ing his own outlook. 

“ Three months it is come the seventh since he come 
in by that very back door — and I hadn’t set eyes on him 
for seven long years. He stood in the door watchin’ 
me, and suddenly he let off a yelp — like a dog, and there 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


234 

he was grinning at the fright he’d given me. ‘ Good 
old Aunty Flo,’ he says, ‘.ain’t you dee-lighted to see 
me ? ’ he says, ‘ now I’m reformed.’ ” 

The plump lady went to the sink and filled the kettle. 

“ I never did like ’im,” she said, standing at the sink. 
“ And seeing him there, with his teeth all black and 
broken . P’raps I didn’t give him much of a wel- 

come at first. Not what would have been kind to him. 
* Lord ! ’ I said, ‘ it’s Jim.’ ” 

“ ‘ It’s Jim,’ he said. ‘ Like a bad shillin’ — like a 
damned bad shilling. Jim and trouble. You all of 
you wanted me Reformed and now you got me Re- 
formed. I’m a Reformatory Reformed Character, war- 
ranted all right and turned out as such. Ain’t you 
going to ask me in, Aunty, dear ? ’ 

“ ‘ Come in,’ I said, ‘ I won’t have it said I wasn’t 
ready to be kind to you ! ’ 

“ He comes in and shuts the door. Down he sits in 
that chair. * I come to torment you ! ’ he says, ‘ you 
Old Sumpthing! ’ and begins at me. . . . No human 

being could ever have been called such things before. It 
made me cry out. * And now,’ he says, ‘ just to show I 
ain’t afraid of ’urting you,’ he says, and ups and twists 
my wrist.” 

Mr. Polly gasped. 

“ I could stand even his vi’lence,” said the plump 
woman, “ if it wasn’t for the child.” 

Mr. Polly went to the kitchen window and surveyed his 
namesake, who was away up the garden path with her 
hands behind her back, and whisps of black hair in dis- 


THE POTWELL INN 


235 

order about her little face, thinking, thinking profoundly, 
about ducklings. 

“ You two oughtn’t to be left,” he said. 

The plump woman stared at his back with hard hope 
in her eyes. 

“ I don’t see that it’s my affair,” said Mr. Polly. 

The plump woman resumed her business with the 
kettle. 

“ I’d like to have a look at him before I go,” said 
Mr. Polly, thinking aloud., And added, “ somehow. 
Not my business, of course.” 

“ Lord ! ” he cried with a start at a noise in the bar, 

who’s that?” 

“ Only a customer,” said the plump woman. 

V 

Mr. Polly made no rash promises, and thought a 
great deal. 

“ It seems a good sort of Crib,” he said, and added, 
“ for a chap who’s looking for trouble.” 

But he stayed on and did various things out of the 
list I have already given, and worked the ferry, and it 
was four days before he saw anything of Uncle Jim. 
And so resistent is the human mind to things not yet 
experienced that he could easily have believed in that 
time that there was no such person in the world as 
Uncle Jim. The plump woman, after her one outbreak 
of confidence ignored the subject, and little Polly seemed 
to have exhausted her impressions in her first communi- 


236 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

cation, and engaged her mind now with a simple direct- 
ness in the study and subjugation of the new human being 
Heaven had sent into her world. The first unfavourable 
impression of his punting was soon effaced; he could 
nickname ducklings very amusingly, create boats out of 
wooden splinters, and stalk and fly from imaginary 
tigers in the orchard with a convincing earnestness that 
was surely beyond the power of any other human being. 
She conceded at last that he should be called Mr. Polly, 
in honour of her, Miss Polly, even as he desired. 

Uncle Jim turned up in the twilight. 

Uncle Jim appeared with none of the disruptive vio- 
lence Mr. Polly had dreaded. He came quite softly. 
Mr. Polly was going down the lane behind the church 
that led to the Potwell Inn after posting a letter to the 
lime-juice people at the post-office. He was walking 
slowly, after his habit, and thinking discursively. With 
a sudden tightening of the muscles he became aware 
of a figure walking noiselessly beside him. His first 
impression was of a face singularly broad above and 
with a wide empty grin as its chief feature below, of a 
slouching body and dragging feet. 

“ Arf a mo’,” said the figure, as if in response to his 
start, and speaking in a hoarse whisper. “ Arf a mo, 
mister. You the noo bloke at the Potwell Inn?” 

Mr. Polly felt evasive. “ ’Spose I am,” he replied 
hoarsely, and quickened his pace. 

“ Arf a mo’,” said Uncle Jim, taking his arm. “ We 
ain’t doing a (sanguinary) Marathon. It ain’t a (deco- 


THE POTWELL INN 237 

rated) cinder track. I want a word with you, mister. 
See?” 

Mr. Polly wriggled his arm free and stopped. “ What 
is it ” he asked and faced the terror. 

“ I jest want a (decorated) word wiv you. See? — 
just a friendly word or two. Just to clear up any 
blooming errors. That’s all I want. No need to be so 
(richly decorated) proud, if you are the noo bloke at 
Potwell Inn. Not a bit of it. See?” 

Uncle Jim was certainly not a handsome person. He 
was short, shorter than Mr. Polly, with long arms and 
lean big hands, a thin and wiry neck stuck out of his 
grey flannel shirt and supported a big head that had 
something of the snake in the convergent lines of its 
broad knotty brow, meanly proportioned face and pointed 
chin. His almost toothless mouth seemed a cavern in 
the twilight. Some accident had left him with one 
small and active and one large and expressionless red- 
dish eye, and whisps of straight hair strayed from under 
the blue cricket cap he wore pulled down obliquely over 
the latter. He spat between his teeth and wiped his 
mouth untidily with soft side of his fist. 

“You got to blurry well sift,” he said. “ See?” 

“ Shift ! ” said Mr. Polly. “ How ? ” 

“ ’Cos the Potwell Inn’s my beat. See ? ” 

Mr. Polly had never felt less witty. “ How’s it your 
beat? ” he asked. 

Uncle Jim thrust his face forward and shook his open 
hand, bent like a claw, under Mr. Polly’s nose. “ Not 
your blooming business,” he said. “ You got to shift.” 


238 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

“ S’pose I don’t,” said Mr. Polly. 

“ You got to shift.” 

The tone of Uncle Jim’s voice became urgent and 
confidential. 

“ You don’t know who you’re up against,” he said. 
“ It’s a kindness I’m doing to warn you. See ? I’m 
just one of those blokes who don’t stick at things, see? 
I don’t stick at nuffin.” 

Mr. Polly’s manner became detached and confidential 
— as though the matter and the speaker interested him 
greatly, but didn’t concern him overmuch. “ What do 
you think you’ll do ? ” he asked. 

“If you don’t clear out? ” 

“ Yes.” 

“Caw/” said Uncle Jim. “You’d better. ’Ere!” 

He gripped Mr. Polly’s wrist with a grip of steel, and 
in an instant Mr. Polly understood the relative quality 
of their muscles. He breathed, an uninspiring breath, 
into Mr. Polly’s face. 

“What won’t I do?” he said. “Once I start in on 
you.” 

He paused, and the night about them seemed to be 
listening. “ I’ll make a mess of you,” he said in his 
hoarse whisper. “ I’ll do you — injuries. I’ll ’urt you. 
I’ll kick you ugly, see? I’ll ’urt you in ’orrible ways — 
’orrible, ugly ways. . . .” 

He scrutinised Mr. Polly’s face. 

“You’ll cry,” he said, “to see yourself. See? Cry 
you will.” 

“ You got no right,” began Mr. Polly. 


THE POTWELL INN 


239 

“ Right ! ” His note was fierce. “ Ain’t the old 
woman me aunt ? ” 

He spoke still closer. “ I’ll make a gory mess of 
you. I’ll cut bits orf you ” 

He receded a little. “ I got no quarrel with you” 
he said. 

“ It’s .too late to go to-night,” said Mr. Polly. 

“ I’ll be round to-morrer — ’bout eleven. See? And 
if I finds you ” 

He produced a blood-curdling oath. 

“ H’m,” said Mr. Polly, trying to keep things light. 
“ We’ll consider your suggestions.” 

“ You better,” said Uncle Jim, and suddenly, noise- 
lessly, was going. 

His whispering voice sank until Mr. Polly could hear 
only the dim fragments of sentences. “ ’Orrible things 
to you — ’orrible things.” . . . “ Kick yer ugly. 
. . . Cut yer — liver out . . . spread it all about, 
I will. . . . Outing doos. See ? I don’t care a dead 

rat one way or the uvver.” 

And with a curious twisting gesture of the arm Uncle 
Jim receded until his face was a still, dim thing that 
watched, and the black shadows of the hedge seemed to 
have swallowed up his body altogether. 

VI 

Next morning about half-past ten Mr. Polly found 
himself seated under a clump of fir trees by the roadside 
and about three miles and a half from the Potwell Inn. 


240 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


He was by no means sure whether he was taking a walk 
to clear his mind or leaving that threat-marred Paradise 
for good and all. His reason pointed a lean, unhesitat- 
ing finger along the latter course. 

For after all, the thing was not his quarrel. 

That agreeable plump woman, agreeable, motherly, 
comfortable as she might be, wasn’t his affair; that 
child with the mop of black hair who combined so magic- 
ally the charm of mouse and butterfly and flitting bird, 
who was daintier than a flower and softer than a peach, 
was no concern of his. Good heavens! what were they 
to him? Nothing! . . . 

Uncle Jim, of course, had a claim, a sort of claim. 

If it came to duty and chucking up this attractive, in- 
dolent, observant, humourous, tramping life, there were 
those who had a right to him, a legitimate right, a prior 
claim on his protection and chivalry. 

Why not listen to the call of duty and go back to 
Miriam now? . . . 

He had had a very agreeable holiday. . . . 

And while Mr. Polly sat thinking these things as well 
as he could, he knew that if only he dared to look up 
the heavens had opened and the clear judgment on his 
case was written across the sky. 

He knew — he knew now as much as a man can know 
of life. He knew he had to fight or perish. 

Life had never been so clear to him before. It had 
always been a confused, entertaining spectacle, he had 
responded to this impulse and that, seeking agreeable 
and entertaining things, evading difficult and painful 


THE POT WELL INN 


241 


things. Such is the way of those who grow up to a 
life that has neither danger nor honour in its texture. 
He had been muddled and wrapped about and entangled 
like a creature born in the jungle who has never seen 
sea or sky. Now he had come out of it suddenly into a 
great exposed place. It was as if God and Heaven 
waited over him and all the earth was expectation. 

“ Not my business,” said Mr. Polly, speaking aloud. 
“ Where the devil do I come in ? ” 

And again, with something between a whine and a 
snarl in his voice, “ not my blasted business ! ” 

His mind seemed to have divided itself into several 
compartments, each with its own particular discussion 
busily in progress, and quite regardless of the others. 
One was busy with the detailed interpretation of the 
phrase “ kick yoi^ ugly.” There’s a sort of French 
wrestling in which you use and guard against feet. 
Watch the man’s eye, and as his foot comes up, grip and 
over he goes — rat your mercy if you use the advantage 
right. But how do you use the advantage rightly? 

When he thought of Uncle Jim the inside feeling of his 
body faded away rapidly to a blank discomfort. . . . 

“ Old cadger ! She hadn't no business to drag me into 
her quarrels. Ought to go to the police and ask for 
help ! Dragging me into a quarrel that don’t concern 
me.” 

“ Wish I’d never set eyes on the rotten inn ! ” 

The reality of the case arched over him like the vault 
of the sky, as plain as the sweet blue heaven above and 
the wide spread of hill and valley about him. Man 


242 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


comes into life to seek and find his sufficient beauty, to 
serve it, to win and increase it, to fight for it, to face 
anything and dare anything for it, counting death as 
nothing so long as the dying eyes still turn to it. And 
fear and dulness and indolence and appetite, which in- 
deed are no more than fear’s three crippled brothers who 
make ambushes and creep by night, are against him, 
to delay him, to hold him ofif, to hamper and beguile and 
kill him in that quest. He had but to lift his eyes to 
see all that, as much a part of his world as the driving 
clouds and the bending grass, but he kept himself down- 
cast, a grumbling, inglorious, dirty, fattish little tramp, 
full of dreads and quivering excuses. 

“ Why the hell was I ever born ? ” he said, with the 
truth almost winning him. 

What do you do when a dirty man who smells, gets 
you down and under in the dirt and dust with a knee 
below your diaphragm and a large hairy hand squeezing 
your windpipe tighter and tighter in a quarrel that 
isn’t, properly speaking, yours? 

“ If I had a chance against him ” protested Mr. 

Polly. 

It’s no Good, you see,’ said Mr. Polly. 

He stood up as though his decision was made, and was 
for an instant struck still by doubt. 

There lay the road before him going this way to the 
east and that to the west. 

Westward, one hour away now, was the Potwell Inn. 
Already things might be happening there. . . . 

Eastward was the wise man’s course, a road dipping 


THE POT WELL INN 


243 


between hedges to a hop garden and a wood and pres- 
ently no doubt reaching an inn, a picturesque church, 
perhaps, a village and fresh company. The wise man’s 
course. Mr. Polly saw himself going along it, and tried 
to see himself going along it with all the self-applause 
a wise man feels. But somehow it wouldn’t come like 
that. The wise man fell short of happiness for all his 
wisdom. The wise man had a paunch and round shoul- 
ders and red ears and excuses. It was a pleasant road 
and why the wise man should not go along it merry and 
singing, full of summer happiness, was a miracle to 
Mr. Polly’s mind, but confound it ! the fact remained, 
the figure went slinking — slinking was the only word 
for it— and would not go otherwise than slinking. He 
turned his eyes westward as if for an explanation, and 
if the figure was no longer ignoble, the prospect was 
appalling. 

“ One kick in the stummick would settle a chap like 
me,” said Mr. Polly. 

“ Oh, God ! ” cried Mr. Polly, and lifted his eyes to 
heaven, and said for the last time in that struggle, ‘ ‘ 1 1 
isn’t my affair!’’ 

And so saying he turned his face towards the Potwell 
Inn. 

He went back neither halting nor hastening in his 
pace after this last decision, but with a mind feverishly 
busy. 

“ If I get killed, I get killed, and if he gets killed I get 
hung. Don’t seem just somehow.” 

“ Don’t suppose I shall frighten him off.” 


244 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


VII 

The private war between Mr. Polly and Uncle Jim 
for the possession of the Potwell Inn fell naturally into 
three chief campaigns. There was first of all the great 
campaign which ended in the triumphant eviction of 
Uncle Jim from the inn premises, there came next after 
a brief interval the futile invasions of the premises by 
Uncle Jim that culminated in the Battle of the Dead Eel, 
and after some months of involuntary truce there was 
the last supreme conflict of the Night Surprise. Each 
of these campaigns merits a section to itself. 

Mr. Polly re-entered the inn discreetly. He found 
the plump woman seated in her bar, her eyes a-stare, her 
face white and wet with tears. “ O God ! ” she was 
saying over and over again. “ O God ! ” The air was 
full of a spiritous reek and on the sanded boards in 
front of the bar were the fragments of a broken bottle 
and an overturned glass. 

She turned her despair at the sound of his entry, and 
despair gave place to astonishment. 

“ You come back ! ” she said. 

“ Ra-ther,” said Mr. Polly. 

“ He’s — he’s mad drunk and looking for her.” 

“ Where is she ? ” 

“ Locked upstairs.” 

“ Haven’t you sent to the police ? ” 

“ No one to send.” 


THE POTWELL INN 245 

“I’ll see to it,” said Mr. Polly. “Out this way?” 

she nodded. 

He went to the crinkly paned window and peered out. 
Uncle Jim was coming down the garden path towards 
the house, his hands in his pockets and singing hoarsely. 
Mr. Polly remembered afterwards with pride and amaze- 
ment that he felt neither faint nor rigid. He glanced 
round him, seized a bottle of beer by the neck as an 
improvised club, and went out by the garden door. 
Uncle Jim stopped amazed. His brain did not instantly 
rise to the new posture of things. “You!” he cried 
and stopped for a moment. “ You — scoot! ” 

“ Your job,” said Mr. Polly, and advanced some paces. 

Uncle Jim stood swaying with wrathful astonishment 
and then darted forward with clutching hands. Mr. 
Polly felt that if his antagonist closed he was lost, and 
smote with all his force at the ugly head before him. 
Smash went the bottle, and Uncle Jim staggered, half- 
stunned by the bloot and blinded with beer. 

The lapses and leaps of the human mind are forever 
mysterious. Mr. Polly had never expected that bottle 
to break. In the instant he felt disarmed and helpless. 
Before him was Uncle Jim, infuriated and evidently 
still coming on, and for defence was nothing but the 
neck of a bottle. 

For a time our Mr. Polly has figured heroic. Now 
comes the fall again; he sounded abject terror; he 
dropped that ineffectual scrap of glass and turned and 
fled round the corner of the house. 

“Bolls!” came the thick voice of the enemy behind 


246 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

him as one who accepts a challenge, and bleeding, but 
indomitable, Uncle Jim entered the house. 

“Bolls!” he said, surveying the bar. “ Fightin’ with 
bolls ! Til showim fightin’ with bolls ! ” 

Uncle Jim had learnt all about fighting with bottles in 
the Reformatory Home. Regardless of his terror- 
stricken aunt he ranged among he bottled beer and suc- 
ceeded after one or two failures in preparing to bottles 
to his satisfaction by knocking off the bottoms, and 
gripping them dagger-wise by the necks. So prepared, 
he went forth again to destroy Mr. Polly. 

Mr. Polly, freed from the sense of urgent pursuit, 
had halted beyond the raspberry canes and rallied his 
courage. Then sense of Uncle Jim victorious in the 
house restored his manhood. He went round by the 
outhouses to the riverside seeking a weapon and found 
an old paddle boat hook. With this he smote Uncle Jim 
as he emerged by the door of the tap. Uncle Jim, blas- 
pheming dreadfully and with dire stabbing intimations 
in either hand, came through the splintering paddle like 
a circus rider through a paper hoop, and once more Mr. 
Polly dropped his weapon and fled. 

A careless observer watching him sprint round and 
round the inn in front of the lumbering and reproachful 
pursuit of Uncle Jim might have formed an altogether 
erroneous estimate of the issue of the campaign. Cer- 
tain compensating qualities of the very greatest military 
value were appearing in Mr. Polly even as he ran; if 
Uncle Jim had strength and brute courage and the rich 
toughening experience a Reformatory Home affords, 


THE POTWELL INN 


247 


Mr. Polly was nevertheless sober, more mobile and with 
a mind now stimulated to an almost incredible nimble- 
ness. So that he not only gained on Uncle Jim, but 
thought what use he might make of this advantage. The 
word “ str ate gions” flamed red across the tumult of his 
mind. As he came round the house for the third time, 
he darted suddenly into the yard, swung the door to 
behind himself and bolted it, seized the zinc pig’s pail 
that stood by the entrance to the kitchen and had it neatly 
and resonantly over Uncle Jim’s head as he came belat- 
edly in round the outhouse on the other side. One of 
the splintered bottles jabbed Mr. Polly’s ear — at the 
time it seemed of no importance — and then Uncle Jim was 
down and writhing dangerously and noisily upon the yard 
tiles, with his head still in the pig pail and his bottles 
gone to splinters, and Mr. Polly was fastening the kitchen 
door against him. 

“ Can’t go on like this for ever,” said Mr. Polly, 
whooping for breath, and selecting a weapon from 
among the brooms that stood behind the kitchen door. 

Urtcle Jim was losing his head. He was up and 
kicking the door and bellowing unamiable proposals and 
invitations, so that a strategist emerging silently by the 
tap door could locate him without difficulty, steal upon 
him unawares and ! 

But before that felling blow could be delivered Uncle 
Jim’s ear had caught a footfall, and he turned. Mr. 
Polly qualied and lowered his broom, — a fatal hesita- 
tion. 


248 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

“ Now I got you! ” cried Uncle Jim, dancing forward 
in a disconcerting zig-zag. 

He rushed to close, and Mr. Polly stopped him neatly, 
as it were a miracle, with the head of the broom across 
his chest. Uncle Jim seized the broom with both hands. 
“ Lea-go ! ” he said, and tugged. Mr. Polly shook his 
head, tugged, and showed pale, compressed lips. Both 
tugged. Then Mr. Polly tried to get round the end of 
the broom; Mr. Polly circled away. They began to 
circle about one another, both lugging hard, both in- 
tensely watchful of the slightest initiative on the part of 
the other. Mr. Polly wished brooms were longer, twelve 
or thirteen feet for example ; Uncle Jim was clearly for 
shortness in brooms. He wasted breath in saying what 
was to happen shortly, sanguinary, oriental soul-blench- 
ing things, when the broom no longer separated them. 
Mr. Polly thought he had never seen an uglier person. 
Suddenly Uncle Jim flashed into violent activity, but 
alcohol slows movement, and Mr. Polly was equal to him. 
Then Uncle Jim tried jerks, and for a terrible instant 
seemed to have the broom out of Mr. Polly’s hands. But 
Mr. Polly recovered it with the clutch of a drowning 
man. Then Uncle Jim drove suddenly at Mr. Polly’s 
midriff, but again Mr. Polly was ready and swept him 
round in a circle. Then suddenly a wild hope filled Mr. 
Polly. He saw the river was very near, the post to 
which the punt was tied not three yards away. With a 
wild yell, he sent the broom home into his antagonist’s 
ribs. “ Wooosh ! ” he cried, as the resistance gave. 

“Oh! Gazu!” said Uncle Jim, going backward help- 


THE POT WELL INN 


249 

lessly, and Mr. Polly thrust hard and abandoned the 
broom to the enemy’s despairing clutch 

Splash! Uncle Jim was in the water and Mr. Polly 
had leapt like a cat aboard the ferry punt and grasped 
the pole. 

Up came Uncle Jim spluttering and dripping. “ You 
(unprofitable matter, and printing it would lead to a 
censorship of novels) ! You know I got a weak chess!” 

The pole took him in the throat and drove him back- 
ward and downwards. 

Lea go ! ” cried Uncle Jim, staggering and with real 
cerror in his once awful eves. 

Splash ! Down he fell backwards into a frothing mass 
of water with Mr. Polly jabbing at him. Under water 
he turned round and came up again as if in flight tow- 
ards the middle of the river. Directly his head reap- 
peared Mr. Polly had him between the shoulders and 
under again, bubbling thickly. A hand clutched and 
disappeared. 

It was stupendous ! Mr. Polly had discovered the heel 
of Achilles. Uncle Jim had no stomach for cold water. 
The broom floated away, pitching gently on the swell. 
Mr. Polly, infuriated with victory, thrust Uncle Jim 
under again, and drove the punt round on its chain in 
such a manner that when Uncle Jim came up for the 
fourth time — and now he was nearly out of his depth, too 
buoyed up to walk and apparently nearly helpless, — 
Mr. Polly, fortunately for them both, could not reach 
him. 


2 5° 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


Uncle Jim made the clumy gestures of those who strug- 
gle insecurely in the water. “ Keep out,” said Mr. Polly. 
Uncle Jim with a great effort got a footing, emerged until 
his arm-pits were out of water, until his waistcoat but- 
tons showed, one by one, till scarcely two remained, 
and made for the camp sheeting. 

“ Keep out ! ” cried Mr. Polly, and leapt off the punt 
and followed the movements of his victim along the 
shore. 

“ I tell you I got a weak chess,” said Uncle Jim, 
moistly. “ This ain’t fair fightin’.” 

“ Keep out ! ” said Mr. Polly. 

“ This ain’t fair figjhtin’,” said Uncle Jim, almost 
weeping, and all his terrors had gone. 

“ Keep out ! ” said Mr. Polly, with an accurately poised 
pole. 

“ I tell you I got to land, you Fool,” said Uncle Jim, 
with a sort of despairing wrathfulness, and began mov- 
ing down-stream. 

“ You keep out,” said Mr. Polly in parallel movement. 
“ Don’t you ever land on this place again ! . . .” 

Slowly, argumentatively, and reluctantly, Uncle Jim 
waded down-stream. He tried threats, he tried persua- 
sion, he even tried belated note of pathos ; Mr. Polly 
remained inexorable, if in secret a little perplexed as to 
the outcome of the situation. “ This cold’s getting to 
my marrer ! ” said Uncle Jim. 

“ You want cooling. You keep out in it,” said Mr. 
Polly. 

They came round the bend into sight of Nicholson’s 


THE POTWELL INN 


251 


ait, where the backwater runs down to the Potwell Mill.- 
And there, after much parley and several feints, Uncle 
Jim made a desperate effort and struggled into clutch of 
the overhanging osiers on the island, and so got out 
of the water with the mill stream between them. He 
emerged dripping and muddy and vindictive. “ By 
Gaw! ” he said. “ I’ll skin you for this ! ” 

“ You keep off or I’ll do worse to you,” said Mr. 
Polly. 

The spirit was out of Uncle Jim for the time, and he 
turned away to struggle through the osiers towards the 
mill, leaving a shining trail of water among the green- 
grey stems. 

Mr. Polly returned slowly and thoughtfully to the inn, 
and suddenly his mind began to bubble with phrases. 
The plump woman stood at the top of the steps that led 
up to the inn door to greet him. 

“ Law ! ” she cried as he drew near, “ ’asn’t ’e killed 
you?” 

“ Do I look like it? ” said Mr. Polly. 

“ But where’s Jim? ” 

“ Gone off.” 

“ ’E was mad drunk and dangerous ! ” 

“ I put him in the river,” said Mr. Polly. “ That 
toned down his alcolaceous frenzy ! I gave him a bit 
of a doing altogether.” 

“ Hain’t he ’urt you?” 

“Not a bit of it!” 

“ Then what’s all that blood beside your ear? ” 

Mr. Polly felt. “ Quite a cut ! Funny had one over- 


252 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

looks things! Heated moments! He must have done 
that when he jabbed about with those bottles. Hullo, 
Kiddy! You venturing downstairs again?” 

“ Ain’t he killed you ? ” asked the little girl. 

“ Well ! ” 

“ I wish I’d seen more of the fighting.” 

“ Didn’t you?” 

“ All I saw was you running round the house and 
Uncle Jim after you.” 

There was a little pause. “ I was leading him on,” 
said Mr. Polly. 

“ Someone’s shouting at the ferry,” she said. 

“ Right O. But you won’t see any more of Uncle Jim 
for a bit. We’ve been having a conversazione about 
that.” 

“ I believe it is Uncle Jim,” said the little girl. 

“ Then he can wait,” said Mr. Polly shortly. 

He turned round and listened for the words that 
drifted across from the little figure on the opposie bank. 
So far as he could judge, Uncle Jim was making an ap- 
pointment for the morrow. He replied with a defiant 
movement of the punt .pole. The little figure was con- 
vulsed for a moment and then went on its way upstream 
— fiercely. 

So it was the first campaign ended in an insecure vic- 
tory. 

VIII 

The next day was Wednesday and a slack day for the 
Potwell Inn. It was a hot, close day, full of the mur- 


THE POTWELL INN 


253 


muring of bees. One or two peope crossed by the ferry, 
an elaboraely equipped fisherman stopped for cold meat 
and dry ginger ale in the bar parour, some haymakers 
came and drank beer for an hour, and afterwards sent 
jars and jugs by a boy to be replenished; that was all. 
Mr. Polly had risen early and was busy about the place 
meditating upon the probable tactics of Uncle Jim. He 
was no longer strung up to the desperate pitch of the 
first encounter. But he was grave and anxious. Uncle 
Jim had shrunken, as all antagonists that are boldly 
faced shrink, after the first battle, to the negotiable, the 
vulnerable. Formidable he was no doubt, but not in- 
vincible. He had, under Providence, been defeated 
once, and he might be defeated altogether. 

Mr. Polly went about the place considering the mili- 
tant possibilities of pacific things, pokers, copper sticks, 
garden implements, kitchen knives, garden nets, barbed 
wire, oars, clothes lines, blankets, pewter pots, stockings 
and broken bottles. He prepared a club with a stocking 
and a bottle inside upon the best East End model. He 
swung it round his head once, broke an olthouse window 
with a flying fragment of glass, and ruined the stocking 
beyond all darning. He developed a subtle scheme with 
the cellar flap as a sort of pitfall, but he rejected it 
finally because (A) it might entrap the plump woman, 
and (B) he had no use whatever for Uncle Jim in the 
cellar. He determined to wire the garden that evening, 
burglar fashion, against the possibilities of a night at- 
tack. 

Towards two o’clock in the afternoon three young 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


254 

men arrived in a capacious boat from the direction of 
Lammam, and asked permission to camp in the paddock. 
It was given all the more readily by Mr. Polly because 
he perceived in their proximity a possible check upon 
the self-expression of Uncle Jim. But ht did not foresee 
and no one could have foreseen that Uncle Jim, stealing 
unawares upon the Potwell Inn in the late afternoon, 
armed with a large rough-hewn stake, should have mis- 
taken the bending form of one of those campers — who 
was pulling a few onions by permission in the garden — 
for Mr. Polly’s, and crept upon it swiftly and silently 
and smitten its wide invitation unforgettably and unfor- 
giveably. It was an error impossible to explain ; the 
resounding whack went up to heaven, the cry of amaze- 
ment, and Mr. Polly emerged from the inn armed with 
the frying-pan he was cleaning, to take this reckless 
assailant in the rear. Uncle Jim, realising his error, 
fled blaspheming into the arms of the other two campers, 
who were returning from the village with butcher’s 
meat and groceries. They caught him, they smacked 
his face with steak and punched him with a bursting 
parcel of lump sugar, they held him thocgh, he bit them, 
and their idea of punishment was to duck him. They 
were hilarious, strong young stockbrokers’ clerks, terri- 
torials and seasoned boating men, they ducked him as 
though it was romping, and all that Mr. Polly had to 
do was to pick up lumps of sugar for them and wipe 
them on his sleeve and put them on a plate, and explain 
that Uncle Jim was a notorious bad character and not 
quite right in his head. 


THE POTWELL INN 


255 


“ Got a regular obsession that the Missis is his Aunt,” 
said Mr. Polly, expanding it. “ Perfect noosance he is.” 

But he caught a glance of Uncle Jim’s eye as he 
receded before the camper’s urgency that boded ill for 
him, and in the night he had a disagreeable idea that 
perhaps his luck might not hold for the third occasion. 

That came soon enogh. So soon indeed as the camp- 
ers had gone. 

Thursday was the early closing day at Lammam, and 
next to Sunday the busiest part of the week at the Pot- 
well Inn. Sometimes as many as six boats all at once 
would be moored against the ferry punt and hiring row- 
boats. People could either have a complete tea, a com- 
plete tea with jam, cake and eggs, a kettle of boiling 
water and find the rest, or refreshments a la carte, as 
they choose. They sat about, but usually the boiling 
water-ers had a delicacy about using the tables and 
grouped themselves humbly on the ground. The com- 
plete tea-ers with jam and eggs got the best tablecloth 
on the table nearest the steps that led up to the glass- 
panelled door. The groups about the lawn were very 
satisfying to Mr. Polly’s sense of amenity. To the right 
were the complete tea-ers with everything heart could 
desire, then a small group of three young men in re- 
markable green and violet and pale-blue shirts, and two 
girls in mauve and yellow blouses with common teas 
and gooseberry jam at the green clothless table, then 
on the grass down by the pollard willow a small family 
of hot water-ers with a hamper, a little troubled by 
wasps in their jam from the nest in the tree and all in 


256 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

mourning, but happy otherwise, and on the lawn to the 
right a ginger beer lot of ’prentices without their collars 
and very jocular and happy. The young people in the 
rainbow shirts and blouses formed the centre of interest ; 
they were under the leadership of a gold-spectacled senior 
with a fluting voice and an air of mystery; he ordered 
everything, and showed a peculiar knowledge of the 
qualities of the Potwell jams, preferring gooseberry 
with much insistence. Mr. Polly watched him, chris- 
tened him the " bemiluous influence,” glanced at the 
’prentices and went inside and down into the cellar in 
order to replenish the stock of stone ginger beer which 
the plump woman had allowed to run low during the 
preoccupations of the campaign. It was in the cellar 
that he first became aware of the return of Uncle Jim. 
He became aware of him as a voice, a voice not only 
hoarse, but thick, as voices thicken under the influence 
of alcohol. 

“ Where’s that muddy-faced mongrel ? ” cried Uncle 
Jim. “ Let ’im come out to me! Where’s that blighted 
whisp with the punt pole — I got a word to say to ’im. 
Come out of it, you pot-bellied chunk of dirtiness, you! 
Come out and ’ave your ugly face wiped. I got a 
Thing for you. . . . ’ Ear me? 

“ ’E’s ’iding, that’s what ’e’s doing,” said the voice of 
Uncle Jim, dropping for a moment to sorrow, and then 
with a great increment of wrathfulness : “ Come out of 
my nest, you blinking cuckoo, you, or I’ll cut your silly 
insides out! Come out of it — you pock-marked rat! 
Stealing another man’s ’ome away from ’im ! Come out 


THE POTWELL INN 


*57 

and look me in the face, you squinting son of a 
Skunk! . . 

Mr. Polly took the ginger beer and went thoughtfully 
upstairs to the bar. 

“ ’E’s back,” said the plump woman as he appeared. 
“ I knew Vd come back.” 

“ I heard him,” said Mr. Polly, and looked about. 
“ Just gimme the old poker handle that’s under the beer 
engine.” 

The door opened softly and Mr. Polly turned quickly. 
But it was only the pointed nose and intelligent face of 
the young man with the gjilt spectacles and discreet 
manner. He coughed and the spectacles fixed Mr. Polly. 

“ I say,” he said with quiet earnestness. “ There’s a 
chap out here seems to want someone.” 

“ Why don’t he come in? ” said Mr. Polly. 

“ He seems to want you out there.” 

“ What’s he want? ” 

“ I think,” said the spectacled young man after a 
thoughtful moment, “ he appears to have brought you a 
present of fish.” 

“ Isn’t he shouting? ” 

“ He is a little boisterous.” 

“ He’d better come in.” 

The manner of the spectacled young man intensified. 
“ I wish you’d come out and persuade him to go away,” 
he said. “ His language — isn’t quite the thing — ladies.” 

“ It never was,” said the plump woman, her voice 
charged with sorrow. 

Mr. Polly moved towards the door and stood with 


258 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

his hand on the handle. The gold-spectacled face dis- 
appeared. 

“ Now, my man,” came his voice from outside. “ Be 
careful what you’re saying — * — ■” 

“ Oo in all the World and Hereafter are you to call 
me, me man?” cried Uncle Jim in the voice of one 
astonished and pained beyond endurance, and added 
scornfully: “You gold-eyed Geezer, you!” 

“ Tut, tut ! ” said the gentleman in gilt glasses. “ Re- 
strain yourself ! ” 

Mr. Polly emerged, poker in hand, just in time to see 
what followed. Uncle Jim in his shirtsleeves and a state 
of ferocious decolletage, was holding something — yes! — 
a dead eel by means of a piece of newspaper about its 
tail, holding it down and back and a little sideways in 
such a way as to smite with it upward and hard. It 
struck the spectacled gentleman under the jaw with a 
peculiar dead thud, and a cry of horror came from the 
two seated parties at the sight. One of the girls shrieked 
piercingly, “ Horace ! ” and everyone sprang up. The 
sense of helping numbers came to Mr. Polly’s aid. 

“ Drop it ! ” he cried, and came down the steps waving 
his poker and thrusting the spectacled gentleman before 
him as once heroes were wont to wield the ox-hide shield. 

Uncle Jim gave ground suddenly, and trod upon the 
foot of a young man in a blue shirt, who immediately 
thrust at him violently with both hands. 

“ Lea go ! ” howled Uncle Jim. “ That’s the chap I’m 
looking for ! ” and pressing the head of the spectacled 
gentleman aside, smote hard at Mr. Polly. 


THE POTWELL INN 


259 


But at the sight of this indignity inflicted upon the 
spectacled gentleman a woman’s heart was stirred, and 
a pink parasol drove hard and true at Uncle Jim’s wiry 
neck, and at the same moment the young man in the blue 
shirt sought to collar him and lost his grip again. 

“ Suffragettes,” gasped Uncle Jim with the ferule at 
his throat. “ Everywhere ! ” and aimed a second more 
successful blow at Mr. Polly. 

“ Wup ! ” said Mr. Polly. 

But now the jam and egg party was joining in the fray. 
A stout yet still fairly able-bodied gentleman in white 
and black checks enquired : “ What’s the fellow up to ? 
Ain’t there no police here ? ” and it was evident that once 
more public opinion was rallying to the support of Mr. 
Polly. 

“ Oh, come on then all the lot of you ! ” cried Uncle 
Jim, and backing dexterously whirled the eel round in a 
destructive circle. The pink sunshade was torn from the 
hand that gripped it and whirled athwart the complete, 
but unadorned tea things on the green table. 

“ Collar him ! Someone get hold of his collar ! ” cried 
the gold-spectacled gentleman coming out of the scrim- 
mage, retreating up the steps to the inn door as if to 
rally his forces. 

“ Stand clear, you blessed mantel ornaments ! ” cried 
Uncle Jim, “ stand clear ! ” and retired backing, staving 
off attack by means of the whirling eel. 

Mr. Polly, undeterred by a sense of grave damage 
done to his nose, pressed the attack in front, the two 
young men in violet and blue skirmished on Uncle Jim’s 


260 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


flanks, the man in white and black checks sought still 
further outflanking possibilities, and two of the appren- 
tice boys ran for oars. The gold-spectacled gentleman, 
as if inspired, came down the wooden steps again, seized 
the tablecloth of the jam and egg party, lugged it from 
under the crockery with inadequate precautions against 
breakage, and advanced with compressed lips, curious 
lateral crouching movements, swift flashings of his 
glasses, and a general suggestion of bull-fighting in his 
pose and gestures. Uncle Jim was kept busy, and unable 
to plan his retreat with any strategic soundness. He 
was moreover manifestly a little nervous about the river 
in his rear. He gave ground in a curve, and so came 
right across the rapidly abandoned camp of the family 
in mourning, crunching a teacup under his heel, over- 
setting the teapot, and finally tripping backwards over 
the hamper. The eel flew out at a tangent from his 
hand and became a mere looping relic on he sward. 

“ Hold him ! ” cried the gentleman in spectacles. 
“ Collar him ! ” and moving forward with extraordinary 
promptitude wrapped the best tablecloth about Uncle 
Jim’s arms and head. Mr. Polly grasped his purpose 
instantly, the man in checks was scarcely slower, and in 
another moment Uncle Jim was no more than a bundle 
of smothered blasphemy and a pair of wildly active legs. 

“ Duck him ! ” panted Mr. Polly, holding on to the 
earthquake. “ Bes’ thing — duck him.” 

The bundle was convulsed by paroxysms of anger and 
protest. One boot got the hamper and sent it ten yards. 


THE POTWELL INN 


261 


“ Go in the house for a clothes line someone ! ” said 
the gentleman in gold spectacles. “ He’ll get out of 
this in a moment.” 

One of the apprentices ran. 

“ Bird nets in the garden,” shouted Mr. Polly# “ In 
the garden ! ” 

The apprentice was divided in his purpose. 

And then suddenly Uncle Jim collapsed and became 
a limp, dead seeming thing under their hands. His arms 
were drawn inward, his legs bent up under his person 
and so he lay. 

“Fainted!” said the man in checks, relaxing his 

grip- 

“ A fit, perhaps,” said the man in spectacles. 

“ Keep hold ! ” said Mr. Polly, too late. 

For suddenly Uncle Jim’s arms and legs flew out like 
springs released. Mr. Polly was tumbled backwards 
and fell over the broken teapot and into the arms of the 
father in mourning. Something struck his head — daz- 
zingly. In another second Uncle Jim was on his feet 
and the tablecloth enshrouded the head of the man in 
checks. Uncle Jim manifestly considered he had done 
all that honour required of him, and against overwhelm- 
ing numbers and the possibility of reiterated duckings, 
flight is no disgrace. 

Uncle Jim fled. 

Mr. Polly sat up after an interval of an indeterminate 
length among the ruins of an idyllic afternoon. Quite 
a lot of things seemed scattered and broken, but it was 
difficult to grasp it all at once. He stared between the 


262 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


legs of people. He became aware of a voice, speaking 
slowly and complainingly. 

“ Someone ought to pay for those tea things,” said the 
father in mourning. “ We didn’t bring them ’ere to be 
danced on, not by no manner of means.” 


IX 

There followed an anxious peace for three days, and 
then a rough man in a blue jersey, in the intervals of 
trying to choke himself with bread and cheese and pickled 
onions, broke out abruptly into information. 

“ Jim’s lagged again, Missus,” he said. 

“ What ! ” said the landlady. “ Our Jim ? ” 

“ Your Jim,” said the man, and after an absolutely 
necessary pause for swallowing, added : “ Stealin’ a 
’atchet.” 

He did not speak for some moments, and then he re- 
plied to Mr. Polly’s enquiries : “ Yet, a ’atchet. Down 
Lammam way — night before last.” 

“ What’d ’e steal a ’atchet for ? ” asked the plump 
woman. 

“ ’E said ’e wanted a ’atchet.” 

“ I wonder what he wanted a hatchet for ! ” said Mr. 
Polly, thoughtfully. 

“ I dessay ’e ’ad a use for it,” said the gentleman in 
the blue jersey, and he took a mouthful that amounted to 
conversational suicide. There was a prolonged pause 
in the little bar, and Mr. Polly did some rapid thinking. 


THE POT WELL INN 263 

He went to the window and whistled. “ I shall stick 
it/’ he whispered at last. “ ’Achets or no ’atchets.” 

He turned to the man with the blue jersey when he 
thought him clear for speech again. “ How much did 
you say they’d given him ? ” he asked. 

“ Three munce,” said the man in the blue jersey, and 
refilled anxiously, as if alarmed at the momentary clear- 
ness of his voice. 

X 

Those three months passed all too buickly ; months of 
sunshine and warmth, of varied novel exertion in the 
open air, of congenial experiences, of interest and whole- 
some food and successful digestion, months that browned 
Mr. Polly and hardened him and saw the beginnings of 
his beard, months marred only by one anxiety, an anxiety 
Mr. Polly did his utmost to suppress. The day of reck- 
oning was never mentioned, it is true, by either the 
plump woman or himself, but the name of Uncle Jim was 
written in letters of glaring silence across their inter- 
course. As the term of that respite drew to an end his 
anxiety increased, until at last it even trenched upon his 
well-earned sleep. He had some idea of buying a re- 
volver. At last he compromised upon a small and very 
foul and dirty rook rifle which he purchased in Lammam 
under a pretext of bird scaring, and loaded carefully and 
concealed under his bed from the plump woman’s eye. 

September passed away, October came. 

And at last came that night in October whose happen- 


264 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

ings it is so difficult for a sympathetic historian to drag 
out of their proper nocturnal indistinctness into the clear, 
hard light of positive statement. A novelist should pre- 
sent characters, not vivisect them publicly. . . . 

The best, the kindliest, if not the justest course is surely 
to leave untold such things as Mr. Polly would mani- 
festly have preferred untold. 

Mr. Polly had declared that when the cyclist discovered 
him he was seeking a weapon that should make a con- 
clusive end to Uncle Jim. That declaration is placed 
before the reader without comment. 

The gun was certainly in possession of Uncle Jim at 
that time and no human being but Mr. Polly knows how 
he got hold of it. 

The cyclist was a literary man named Warspite, who 
suffered from insomnia ; he had risen and come out of 
his house near Lammam just before the dawn, and he 
discovered Mr. Polly partially concealed in the ditch by 
the Potwell churchyard wall. It is an ordinary dry 
ditch, full of nettles and overgrown with elder and dog- 
rose, and in no way suggestive of an arsenal. It is the 
last place in which you would look for a gun. And 
he says that when he dismounted to see why Mr. Polly 
was allowing only the latter part of his person to show 
(and that it would seem by inadvertency), Mr. Polly 
merely raised his head and advised him to “ Look out ! ” 
and added : “ He’s let fly at me twice already.” He 
came out under persuasion and with gestures of extreme 
caution. He was wearing a white cotton nightgown of 
the type that has now been so extensively superseded by 


THE POT WELL INN 265 

pajama sleeping suits, and his legs and feet were bare 
and much scratched and torn and very muddy. 

Mr. Warspite takes that exceptionally lively interest 
in his fellow-creatures which constitutes so much of the 
dstinctive and complex charm of you novelist all the 
world over, and he at once involved himself generously 
in the case. The two men returned at Mr. Polly’s initia- 
tive across the churchyard to the Potwell Inn, and came 
upon the burst and damaged rook rifle near the new 
monument to Sir Samuel Harpon at the corner by the 
yew. 

“ That must have been his third go,” said Mr. Polly. 
“ It sounded a bit funny.” 

The sight inspirited him greatly, and he explained 
further that he had fled to the churchyard on account of 
the cover afforded by tombstones from the flight of small 
shot. He expressed anxiety for the fate of the landlady 
of the Potwell Inn and her grandchild, and led the way 
with enhanced alacrity along the lane to that establish- 
ment. 

They found the doors of the house standing open, 
the bar in some disorder — several bottles of whiskey were 
afterwards found to be missing — and Blake, the village 
policeman, rapping patiently at the open door. He en- 
tered with them. The glass in the bar had suffered 
severely, and one of the mirrors was starred from a 
blow from a pewter pot. The till had been forced and 
ransacked, and so had the bureau in the minute room be- 
hind the bar. An upper window was opened and the 
voice of the landlady became audible making enquiries. 


266 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


They went out and parleyed with her. She had locked 
herself upstairs with the little girl, she said, and refused 
to descend until she as assured that neither Uncle Jim 
nor Mr. Polly’s gun were anywhere on the premises. 
Mr. Blake and Mr. Warspite proceeded to satisfy them- 
selves with regard to the former condition and Mr. 
Polly went to his room in search of garments more 
suited to the brightening dawn. He returned immedi- 
ately with a request that Mr. Blake and Mr. Warspite 
would “ just come and look.” They found the apartment 
in a state of extraordinary confusion, the bedclothes in 
a ball in the corner, the drawers all open and ransacked, 
the chair broken, the lock of the door forced and broken, 
one door panel slightly scorched and perforated by shot, 
and the window wide open. None of Mr. Polly’s clothes 
were to be seen, but some garments which had apparently 
once formed part of a stoker’s workaday outfit, two 
brownish yellow halves of a shirt, and an unsound pair 
of boots were scattered on the floor. A faint smell of 
gunpowder still hung in the air, and two or three books 
Mr. Polly had recently acquired had been shied with 
some violence under the bed. Mr. Warspite looked at 
Mr. Blake, and then both men looked at MJr. Polly. 
“ That’s his boots,” said Mr. Polly. 

Blake turned his eye to the window. “ Some of these 
tiles ’ave just got broken,” he observed. 

“ I got out of the window and slid down the scullery 
tiles,” Mr. Polly answered, omitting much, they both 
felt, from his explanation. . . . 


THE POTWELL INN 


267 

“ Well, we better find ’im and ’ave a word with ’im,” 
said Blake. “ That’s about my business now.” 

But Uncle Jim had gone altogether. . . . 

XII 

He did not return for some days. That perhaps was 
not very wonderful. But the days lengthened to weeks 
and the weeks to months and still Uncle Jim did not 
recur. A year passed, and the anxiety of him became 
less acute ; a second healing year followed the first. One 
afternoon about thirty months after the Night Surprise 
the plump woman spoke of him. 

“ I wonder what’s become of Jim,” she said. 

“ I wonder sometimes,” said Mr. Polly. 


CHAPTER THE TENTH 


MIRIAM REVISITED 

O NE summer afternoon about five years after 
his first coming to the Potwell Inn Mr. Polly 
found himself sitting under the pollard willow 
fishing for ylace. It was a plumper, browner and health- 
ier Mr. Polly altogether than the miserable bankrupt 
with whose dyspeptic portrait our novel opened. He was 
fat, but with a fatness more generally diffused, and the 
lower part of his face was touched to gravity by a small 
square beard. Also he was balder. 

It was the first time he had found leisure to fish, 
though from the very outset of his Potwell career he had 
promised himself abundant indulgence in the pleasures of 
fishing. Fishing, as the golden page of English litera- 
ture testifies, is a meditative and retrospective pursuit, 
and the varied page of memory, disregarded so long for 
sake of the teeming duties I have already enumerated, 
began to unfold itself to Mr. Polly’s consideration. A 
speculation about Uncle Jim died for want of material, 
and gave place to a reckoning of the years and months 
that had passed since his coming to Potwell, and that to 
a philosophical review of his life. He began to think 
about Miriam, remotely and impersonally. He remem- 
268 


MIRIAM REVISITED 


269 

bered many things that had been neglected by his con- 
science during the busier times, as for example, that 
he had committed arson and deserted a wife. For the 
first time he looked these long neglected facts in the face. 

It is disagreeable to think one has committed Arson, 
because it is an action that leads to jail. Otherwise I do 
not think there was a grain of regret for that in Mr. 
Polly’s composition. But deserting Miriam was in a 
different category. Deserting Miriam was mean. 

This is a history and not a glorification of Mr. Polly, 
and I tell of things as they were with him. Apart from 
the disagreeable twinge arising from the thought of 
what might happen if he was found out, he had not the 
slightest remorse about th it fire. Arson, after all, is an 
artificial crime. Some crimes are crimes in themselves, 
would be crimes without any law, the cruelties, mockery, 
the breaches of faith that astonish and wound, but the 
burning of things is in itself neither good nor bad. A 
large number of houses deserve to be burnt, most mod- 
ern furniture, an overwhelming majority of pictures and 
books — one might go on for some time with the list. If 
our community was collectively anything more than a 
feeble idiot, it would burn most of London and Chicago, 
for example, and build san and beautiful cities in the 
place of these pestilential heaps of rotten private prop- 
erty. I have failed in presenting Mr. Polly altogether if 
I have not made you see that he was in many respects 
an artless child of Nature, far more untrained, undis- 
ciplined and spontaneous than an ordinary savage. And 
he was really glad, for all that little drawback of fear, 


270 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


that he had the courage to set fire to his house and fled 
and come to the Potwell Inn. 

But he was not glad he had left Miriam. He had seen 
Miriam cry once or twice in his life, and it had always 
reduced him to abject commiseration. He now imagined 
her crying. He perceived in a perplexed way that he 
had made himself responsible for her life. He forgot 
how she had spoilt his own. He had hitherto rested in 
the faith that she had over a hundred pounds of insur- 
ance money, but now, with his eye meditatively upon his 
float, he realised a hundred pounds does not last for 
ever. His conviction of her incompetence was unflinch- 
ing; she was bound to have fooled it away somehow by 
this time. And then ! 

He saw her humping her shoulders and sniffing in a 
manner he had always regarded as detestable at close 
quarters, but which now became harrowingly pitiful. 

“ Damn ! ” said Mr. Polly, and down went his float and 
he flicked up a victim to destruction and took it oq the 
hook. 

He compared his own comfort and health with 
Miriam’s imagined distress. 

“ Ought to have done something for herself,” said Mr. 
Polly rebaiting his hook. “ She was always talking of 
doing things. Why couldn’t she? ” 

He watched the float oscillating gently towards quies- 
cence. 

“ Silly to begin thinking about her,” he said. “ Dam 
silly!” 


THE POT WELL INN 


271 

But once he had begun thinking about her he had to 
go on. 

“ Oh blow ! ” cried Mr. Polly presently, and pulled up 
his hook to find another fish had just snatched at it in 
the last instant. His handling must have made the poor 
thing feel itself unwelcome. 

He gathered his things together and turned towards 
the house. 

All the Potwell Inn betrayed his influence now, for 
here indeed he had found his place in the world. It 
looked brighter, so bright indeed as to be almost skittish, 
with the white and green paint he had lavished upon it. 
Even the garden palings were striped white and green, 
and so were the boats, for Mr. Polly was one of those 
who find a positive sensuous pleasure in the laying on of 
paint. Left and right were two large boards which had 
done much to enhance the inn’s popularity with the 
lighter minded variety of pleasure-seekers. Both marked 
innovations. One bore in large letters the single word 
“ Museum,” the other was as plain and laconic with 
“ Omlets ! ” The spelling of the latter word was Mr. 
Polly’s own, but when he had seen a whole boatload of 
men, intent on Lammam for lunch, stop open-mouthed, 
and stare and grin and come in and asked in a marked 
sarcastic manner for “ omlets,” he perceived that his in- 
accuracy had done more for the place than his utmost 
cunning could have contrived. In a year or so the inn 
was known both up and down the river by its new name 
of “ Omlets,” and Mr. Polly, after some secret irrita- 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


272 

tion, smiled and was content. And the fat woman’s 
omelettes were things to remember. 

(You will note I have changed her epithet. Time 
works upon us all.) 

She stood upon the steps as he came towards the 
house, and smiled at him richly. 

“ Caught many ? ” she asked. 

“ Got an idea,” said Mr. Polly. “ Would it put you 
out very much if I went off for a day or two for a bit 
of a holiday? There won’t be much doing now until 
Thursday.” 

II 

Feeling recklessly secure behind his beard Mr. Polly 
surveyed the Fishbourne Hight Street once again. The 
north side was much as he had known it except that 
Rusper had vanished. A row of new shops replaced the 
destruction of the great fire. Mantell and Throbson’s 
had risen again upon a more flamboyant pattern, and the 
new fire station was in the Swiss Teutonic style and with 
much red paint, next door in the place of Rumbold’s was 
a branch of the Colonial Tea Company, and then a 
Salmon and Gluckstein Tobacco Shop, and then a little 
shop that displayed sweets and professed a “Tea Room 
Upstairs.” He considered this as a possible place in 
which to prosecute enquiries about his lost wife, wavering 
a little between it and the God’s Providence Inn down 
the street. Then his eye caught a name over the window, 
“ Polly,” he read, “ & Larkin ! Well, I’m — astonished ! ” 

A momentary faintness came upon him. He walked 


MIRIAM REVISITED 273 

past and down the street, returned and surveyed the shop 
again. 

He saw a middle-aged, rather untidy woman standing 
behind the counter, whom for an instant he thought might 
by Miriam terribly changed, and then recognised as his 
sister-in-law Annie, filled out and no longer hilarious. 
She stared at him without a sign of recognition as he 
entered the shop. 

“ Can I have tea ? ” said Mr. Polly. 

“ Well, ,, said Annie, “ you can. But our Tea Room’s 
upstairs. . . . My sister’s been cleaning it out — and 

it’s a bit upset.” 

“ It would be,” said Mr. Polly softly. 

“ I beg your pardon ? ” said Annie. 

“ I said / didn’t mind. Up here?” 

“ I daresay there’ll be a table,” said Annie, and fol- 
lowed him up to a room whose conscientious disorder was 
intensely reminiscent of Miriam. 

“ Nothing like turning everything upside down when 
you’re cleaning,” said Mr. Polly cheerfully. 

“ It’s my sister’s way,” said Annie impartially. “ She’s 
gone out for a bit of air, but I daresay she’ll be back soon 
to finish. It’s a nice light room when it’s tidy. Can I put 
you a table over there ? ” 

“ Let me” said Mr. Polly, and assisted. 

He sat down by the open window and drummed on 
the table and meditated on his next step while Annie 
vanished to get his tea. After all, things didn’t seem so 
bad with Miriam. He tried over several gambits in 
imagination. 


274 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


“ Unusual name,” he said as Annie laid a cloth before 
him. 

Annie looked interrogation. 

“Polly. Polly & Larkins. Real, I suppose?” 

“ Polly’s my sister’s name. She married a Mr. Polly.” 

“ Widow I presume ? ” said Mr. Polly. 

“ Yes. This five years — come October.” 

“ Lord ! ” said Mr. Polly in unfeigned surprise. 

“ Found drowned he was. There was a lot of talk in 
the place.” 

“ Never heard of it,” said Mr. Polly.“ I’m a stranger 
— rather.” 

“ In the Medway near Maidstone. He must have been 
in the water for days. Wouldn’t have known him, my 
sister wouldn’t, if it hadn’t been for the name sewn in his 
clothes. All whitey and eat away he was.” 

“ Bless my heart ! Must have been rather a shock for 
her!” 

“ It was a shock,” said Annie, and added darkly : “ But 
sometimes a shock’s better than a long agony.” 

“ No doubt,” said Mr. Polly. 

He gazed with a rapt expression at the preparations 
before him. “ So I’m drowned,” something was saying 
inside him. “ Life insured? ” he asked. 

“ We started the tea rooms with it,” said Annie. 

Why, if things were like this, had remorse and anxiety 
for Miriam been implanted in his soul? No shadow of 
an answer appeared. 

“ Marriage is a lottery,” said Mr. Polly. 


MIRIAM REVISITED 275 

" She found it so,” said Annie. “ Would you like some 
jam? ” 

“ Td like an egg,” said Mr. Polly. “ I’ll have two. 
I’ve got a sort of feeling . As though I wanted keep- 
ing up. . . . Wasn’t particularly good sort, this Mr. 

Polly? ” 

“ He was a wearing husband,” said Annie. “ I’ve often 
pitied my sister He was one of that sort ” ffl 

“ Dissolute ? ” suggested Mr. Polly faintly. 

“ No,” said Annie judiciously; “not exactly dissolute. 
Feeble’s more the word. Weak, ’E was. Weak as 
water. ’Ow long do you like your eggs boiled ? ” 

“ Four minutes exactly,” said Mr. Polly. 

“ One gets talking,” said Annie. 

“ One does,” said Mr. Polly, and she left him to his 
thoughts. 

What perplexed him was his recent remorse and ten- 
derness for Miriam. Now he was back in her atmosphere 
all that had vanished, and the old feeling of helpless an- 
tagonism returned. He surveyed the piled furniture, the 
economically managed carpet, the unpleasing pictures on 
the wall. Why had he felt remorse? Why had he en- 
tertained this illusion of a helpless woman crying aloud 
in the pitiless darkness for him? He peered into the 
unfathomable mysteries of the heart, and ducked back 
to a smaller issue. Was he feeble ? 

The eggs came up. Nothing in Annie’s manner invited 
a resumption of the discussion. 

“ Business brisk? ” he ventured to ask. 


276 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

Annie reflected. “ It is,” she said, “ and it isn’t. It’s 
like that.” 

“ Ah ! ” said Mr. Polly, and squared himself to his egg. 
“ Was there an inquest on that chap? ” 

“ What chap?” 

“ What was his name ? — -Polly ! ” 

“ Of course.” 

“ You’re sure it was him? ” 

“ What you mean, ” ffl 

Annie looked at him hard, and suddenly his soul was 
black with terror. 

“ Who else could it have been — in the very does ’e 
wore? ” 

“ Of course,” said Mr. Polly and began his egg. He 
was so agitated that he only realised its condition when 
he was half way through it and Annie safely downstairs. 

“ Lord ! ” he said, reaching out hastily for the pepper. 
“ One of Miriam’s ! Management ! I haven’t tasted 
such, an egg for five years. . . . Wonder where she 

gets them ! Picks them out, I suppose ! ” 

He abandoned it for its fellow. 

Except for a slight mustiness the second egg was very 
palatable indeed. He was getting on to the bottom of it 
as Miriam came in. He looked up. “ Nice afternoon,” 
he said at her stare, and perceived she knew him at once 
by the gesture and the voice. She went white and shut 
the door behind her. She looked as though she was 
going to faint. Mr. Polly sprang up quickly and haiided 
her a chair. “ My God ! ” she whispered, and crumpled 
up rather than sat down. 


MIRIAM REVISITED 


277 


“ It’s you,” she said. 

“ No,” said Mr. Polly very earnestly. “ It isn’t. It 
just looks like me. That’s all.” 

“ I knew that man wasn’t you — all along. I tried to 
think it was. I tried to think perhaps the water had 
altered your wrists and feet and the colour of your hair.” 
“ Ah ! ” 

“ IM always feared you’d come back.” 

Mr. Polly sat down by his egg. “ I haven’t come 
back,” he said very earnestly. “ Don’t you think it.” 

“ ’Ow we’ll pay back the insurance now I don't know.” 
She was weeping. She produced a handkerchief and 
covered her face. 

“ Look here, Miriam,” said Mr. Polly. “ I haven’t 
come back and I’m not coming back. I’m — I’m a Visi- 
tant from Another World. You shut up about me and 
I’ll shut up about myself. I came back because I thought 
you might be hard up or in trouble or some silly thing 
like that. Now I see you again — I’m satisfied. I’m 
satisfied completely. See? I’m going to absquatulate, 
see ? Hey Presto right away.” 

He turned to his tea for a moment, finished his cup 
noisily, stood up. 

“ Don’t you think you’re going to see me again,” he 
said, “ for you ain’t.” 

He moved to the door. 

“ That was a tasty egg,” he said, hovered for a second 
and vanished. 

Annie was in the shop. 

“ The missus has had a bit of a shock,” he remarked. 


278 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 

“ Got some sort of fancy about a ghost. Can’t make it 
out guite. So Long ! ” 

And he had gone. 

Ill 

Mr. Polly sat beside the fat woman at one of the little 
green tables at the back of the Potwell Inn, and struggled 
with the mystery of life. It was one of those evenings, 
serenely luminous, amply and atmospherically still, when 
the river bend was at its best. A swan floated against 
the dark green masses of the further bank, the stream 
flowed broad and shining to its destiny, with scarce a rip- 
ple — except where the reeds came out from the headland 
— the three poplars rose clear and harmonious against a 
sky of green and yellow. And it was as if it was all 
securely within a great warm friendly globe of crystal 
sky. It was as safe and enclosed and fearless as a child 
that has still to be bom. It was an evening full of the 
quality of tranquil, unqualified assurance. Mr. Polly’s 
mind was filled with the persuasion that indeed all things 
whatsoever must needs be satisfying and complete. It 
was incredible that life has ever done more than seemed 
to jar, that there could be any shadow in life save such 
velvet softnesses as madt the setting for that silent swan, 
or any murmur but the ripple of the water as it swirled 
round the chained and gently swaying punt. And the 
mind of Mr. Polly, exalted and made tender by this at- 
mosphere, sought gently, but sought, to draw together 
the varied memories that came drifting, half submerged, 
across the circle of his mind. 


MIRIAM REVISITED 


279 


He spoke in words that seemed like a bent and broken 
stick thrust suddenly into water, destroying the mirror 
of the shapes they sought. “ Jim’s not coming back 
again ever, he said. “ He got drowned five years ago.” 

“ Where ? ” asked the fat woman, surprised. 

“ Miles from here. In the Medway. Away in Kent.” 

“ Lor ! ” said the fat woman. 

“ It’s right enough,” said Mr. Polly. 

“ How d’you know ? ” 

“ I went to my home.” 

“Where?” 

“ Don’t matter. I went and found out. He’d been in 
the water some days. He’d got my clothes and they’d 
said it was me.” 

“ They?” 

“ It don’t matter. I’m not going back to them.” 

The fat woman regarded him silently for some time. 
Her expression of scrutiny gave way to a quiet satis- 
faction. Then her brown eyes went to the river. 

“ Poor Jim,” she said. “ ’E ’adn’t much Tact — ever.” 

She added mildly : “ I can’t ’ardly say I’m sorry.” 

“ Nor me,” said Mr. Polly, and got a step nearer the 
thought in him. “ But it don’t seem much good his 
having been alive, does it?” 

“ ’E wasn’t much good,” the fat woman admitted. 
“ Ever.” 

“ I suppose there were things that were good to him,” 
Mr. Polly speculated. “ They weren’t our things.” 

His hpld slipped again. “ I often wonder about life,” 
he said weakly. 


280 THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


He tried again. “ One seems to start in life,” he said, 
“ expecting something. And it doesn’t happen. And it 
doesn’t matter. One starts with ideas that things are 
good and things are bad — and it hasn’t much relation to 
what is good and what is bad. I’ve always been the skep- 
taceous sort, and it’s always seemed rot to me to pretend 
we know good from evil It’s just what I’ve never done. 
No Adam’s apple stuck in my throat, ma’am. I don’t own 
to it.” 

He reflected. 

“ I set fire to a house — once.” 

The fat woman started. 

“ I don’t feel sorry for it. I don’t believe it was a bad 
thing to do — any more than burning a toy like I did once 
when I was a baby. I nearly killed myself with a razor. 
Who hasn’t? — anyhow gone as far as thinking of it? 
Most of my time I’ve been half dreaming. I married 
like a dream almost. I’ve never really planned my life 
or set out to live I happened; things happened to me. 
It’s so with everyone. Jim couldn’t help himself. I shot 
at him and tried to kill him. I dropped the gun and he 
got it. He very nearly had me. I wasn’t a second too 
soon — ducking. . . . Awkward — that night was. 
. . . M’mm. . . . But I don’t blame him — come 
to that. Only I don’t see what it’s all up to. . . . 

“ Like children playing about in a nursery. Hurt 
themselves at times. . . . 

“ There’s something that doesn’t mind us/’ he resumed 
presently. “ It isn’t what we try to get that we get, it 
isn’t the good we think we do is good. What makes us 


MIRIAM REVISITED 


281 

happy isn’t our trying, what makes others happy isn’t 
our trying. There’s a sort of character people like and 
stand up for and a sort they won’t. You got to work it 
out and take the consequences. . . . Miriam was al- 

ways trying.” 

“ Who was Miriam ? ” asked the fat woman. 

“ No one you know. But she used to go about with her 
brows knit trying not to do whatever she wanted to do — 
if ever she did want to do anything •” 

He lost himself. 

“ You can’t help being fat,” said the fat woman after a 
pause, trying to get up to his thoughts. 

" You can’t,” said Mr. Polly. 

“ It helps and it hinders.” 

“ Like my upside down way of talking.” 

“ The magistrates wouldn’t ’ave kept on the license to 
me if I ’adn’t been fat. . . .” 

“ Then what have we done,” said Mr. Polly, “ to get 
an evening like this ? Lord ! look at it ! ” He sent his 
arm round the great curve of the sky. 

“ If I was a nigger or an Italian I should come out 
here and sing. I whistle sometimes, but bless you, it’s 
singing I’ve got in my mind. Somtimes I think I live 
for sunsets.” 

“ I don’t see that it does you any good always looking 
at sunsets like you do,” said the fat woman. 

“ Nor me. But I do. Sunsets and things I was made 
to like.” 

“ They don’t ’elp you,” said the fat woman thought- 
fully. 


282 


THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY 


“ Who cares ? ” said Mr. Polly. 

A deeper strain had come to the fat woman. “ You 
got to die some day,” she said. 

“ Some thing I can’t believe,” said Mr. Polly suddenly, 
“ and one is your being a skeleton. . . .” He pointed 

his hand towards the neighbour’s hedge. “ Look at ’em 
— against the yellow — and they’re just stingin’ nettles. 
Nasty weeds — if you count things by their uses. And no 
help in the life hereafter. But just look at the look of 
them!” 

“ It isn’t only looks,” said the fat woman. 

“ Whenever there’s signs of a good sunset and I’m not 
too busy,” said Mr. Polly, “ I’ll come and sit out here.” 

The fat woman looked at him with eyes in which 
contentment struggled with some obscure reluctant pro- 
test, and at last turned them slowly to the black nettle 
pagodas against the golden sky. 

“ I wish we could,” she said. 

“ I will?’ 

The fat woman’s voice sank nearly to the inaudible. 

“ Not always,” she said. 

Mr. Polly was sometime before he replied. “ Come 
here always when I’m a ghost,” he replied. 

“ Spoil the place for others,” said the fat woman, 
abandoning her moral solitictudes for a more congenial 
point of view. 

“ Not my sort of ghost wouldn’t,” said Mr. Polly, 
emerging from another long pause. “ I’d be a sort of 
diaphalous feeling — just mellowish and warmish 
like. ...” -<> 


MIRIAM REVISITED 283 

They said no more, but sat on in the warm twilight 
until at last they could scarcely distinguish each other’s 
faces. They were not so much thinking as lost in a 
smooth, still quiet of the mind. A bat flitted by. 

“ Time we was going in, O’ Party,” said Mr. Polly 
standing up. “ Supper to get. It’s as you say, we can’t 
sit here for ever.” 


THE END. 













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